Interlinking Your Sites - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

Oh this week on whiteboard Friday we're going to be talking about interlinking your site and this is a particularly relevant I think interesting topic for a lot of people who are thinking about like I own you know several websites or I have relationships with a lot of websites I control a bunch of sites maybe there are their sights of of clients or partners a lot of times they're just sites that you've owned and registered yourself or that your company has and I hear a lot of this question in an introspection around like hmm how much can I interlink and I you know inner link between all the pages and all the sites to help boost my page rank and send good anchor text all these kinds of things seems like owning my own websites I can control all this stuff will be really good for my co but there are some dangers here right the search engines don't want to be manipulated by someone who owns fifty or a hundred or a thousand different websites and so you need to be careful there's some best practices to follow along these lines I'm going to use some simple examples but you can extrapolate these out to more complex situations or does specific situation you might be facing so first rule of this interlinking phenomenon is to link for humans and users first and think about engines second now the the reason for this isn't because I'm telling you oh you know you have to be super pearly white hat and you know we can never do anything that would have factory impact or manipulate the search engines I understand that you're going to want to get you know good anchor text you're going to want to flow link juice from powerful pages two pages that need to be indexed that you want to rank well and that's okay so long as you think about why humans would want to pass from one page to another so let me give you an example you know let's say I'm on this this domain that I own and control and I can find a you know a page on here where boy you know I I talk about something that exists on domain to a resource a relevant topic something where you can learn more information about that specific subject whether it's a commercial intent informational oriented you know a cool piece of linkbait a piece of news whatever it is that exists over here that makes great sense to link over to right and I think it's perfectly fine and legitimate to link from those so for example if if there's some great news about you know how elephants at a particular zoo have been thriving in the new environment and you want to rank well for you know elephants at this particular zoo let's say at the Bangalore zoo it's fine if you want to if you have some content over here that mentions those words that's talking about them in a post in an update in a news item something relevant and you link over that works great because that way humans who might want to learn more about this topic can go over there then get that information it's exactly what they want and now engines as well we'll see and recognize that but if you do something spammy or manipulative and this goes to rule number two and you put something like you know elephants Bangalore zoo in the footer right of every page like oh this page has that page has that page oh boy and they're all linking over to this one and then domain three and domain for domain five they're all linking there too that's super weird right so putting that those things in footers having overly optimized anchor text right anchor text that just doesn't sound natural doesn't fit with the flow of the page has nothing to do with the content of what's on there throwing in unrelated links throwing in an elephant's Bangalore zoo when this page is about you know where to buy pens just though that kind of stuff is going to be confusing to humans as to why it exists and that'll mean that it might get spam reported to google it might be seen manually by quality raters or it might be algorithmically detected none of which you want to have happen and besides which you don't want to be scaring off your users with this manipulative junky stuff anyway right users are sensitive to spam and manipulation just like engines are and they'll be turned off they'll they'll think less of your brand in your site when they see that type of stuff so watch out for that third last rule Google really knows a lot about what what's happening on the web through not just things like Google Analytics but through google webmaster tools through email accounts through feedburner through the google toolbar right and if they see that you appear to be trying to hide a link profile from them and Link profiles are looking really similar between your different o mains and there's lots of interlinking happening and the registration or hosting looks like it matches there are some SEOs certainly out there who are advanced and sophisticated enough to be able to spread their network out and and have that rigid discipline about you know never visiting the same two sites of the google toolbar on and and not making you know making sure that no Webmaster Tools accounts are linking all this kind of stuff that that black hat operators often have to jump through these these different hoops there are ways to do it but as an ordinary marketer ordinary operator you know SEO miles type Y hat operator yeah you're really going to want to be authentic and it's okay to link between sites that you own I wouldn't be paranoid about this just make sure you follow these rules and do it in a genuine authentic way because the then Google is not going to be like oh you know this guy owns these sites he's linking back and forth between these can be 00 hey yes some news about elephants and no he points over here yeah that makes total sense or you know on his about page he mentions the other sites that are also owned by the business owners of this site seems totally reasonable and fine maybe the privacy policy might have you know this this privacy policy or these terms of use govern these five different websites that link out to all of them that's okay right that makes total sense but having manipulative anchor text in the footer of every page or in the sidebar of every page on all these different domains that's going to get you in trouble I'd watch out for that already one hopefully you enjoyed this edition of whiteboard Friday take care we'll see you again soon you