Ok so here's the plan... I have a domain, let's call it sandwiches.com, it's an ok domain and has lots of recipies for snadwiches on it, the main ones being - ham sandwiches, cheese sandwiches and egg sandwiches. Now each of these has a newsfeed for new recipies.
So, in order to improve the overall ranking for "sandwiches.com" my theory is to buy the domains "ham-sandwiches.com", "cheese-sandwiches.com" and "egg-sandwiches.com" I then setup websites on different servers ( different ips ) and run my sandwich feeds into the these new sites - so obviously "ham-sandwiches.com" gets the ham feed and so on...
The sites always point back to sandwiches.com as they are simply feeds of existing - just Title, Keywords, Summary and Link. Now I'm not bothered really about the "hyphen" in the domain name because ultimately I just want readers to end up on sandwiches.com.
I don't really think this is link farming or black hat because I genuinely want people to find recipies for ham sandwiches... I don't care if my "ham-sandwiches.com" appears on page 2,3,4 or 100 as long as when somebody types "ham sandwiches" into google, my actual domain comes up on the first page eg. "sandwiches.com/ham.html"
I guess the question is - does this create valid extra backlinks for my main site?
Are these backlinks worth having as the PR on the feeder sites will be low?
The feeder sites will only ever show newsfeeds from the main site - so will be completely automatic once they are initially setup
Please excuse the rather daft example but it's just to illustrate the concept.
It all seems "too easy" so I'm interested in what the experts have to say
Many thanks in advance
Dean Richard
[ Editor ]
Not really. Your time (and money) is better spent on actual links from high-PR sites. Your other domains, unless you put equal or more work into them, will still have a low PR, and Google will see right through it. And while you are correct in that it might not be “black hat” per se, it’s awfully close, at least in the eyes of Google. While your intentions may be the best (I’m not saying they’re not), if they allowed this all the time, we’d see domain prices skyrocket (again), as buying up similar domains would become essential to SEO, and would litter the web with (more) spammy sites.
Ok thanks Dean, but lets throw in another parameter – let’s hypothetically say that these sites not only run backlinks to the main site, but also they individually become “Social Groups” or forums around the concepts ( like page2sucks is for SEM ) So while the domain is never actually marketed directly – all the group interactivity occurs on the domain rather than the main site – would this then serve to validate the approach?
Basically it would mean the domains become active – rather than simply referring links
Also, how many of these do you want, and might they ultimately take away from the site you’re actually trying to promote? For example, you want everyone to ultimately end up at sandwiches.com, but you have discussions/forums at ham-sandwiches.com, cheese-sandwiches.com, etc and everyone LOVES those sites. They get tons of traffic and people are trading sandwich recipes and everyone is happy- but you missed your goal, unless you’re the type of guy who just really wants everyone to have yummy sandwiches, while making no money. In short, are you populating the internet with sites that actually detract from what you’re trying to do (get conversions), even though they include links back to your main sandwiches.com site?
To put some quick numbers to your example, there are 24 million search results for ‘sandwhiches’, including several recipe sites, and ‘sandwich recipe’ gives me nearly 6 million results. The word ‘sandwich’ is Googled roughly 11 million times per month. Is buying and maintaining 3 or more domains going to get you more? Probably not.
