Question about larger branchy info rich sites

[elanvital]

I have a question about site size - and search engines. I have a topic that I've been researchingI think Ihave a really cool angle on, and one that I'll really enjoy doing.

I've heard that it is good to keep you niche small, and have 5-10 tier 2 pages and 10 tier 3 pages in order to be prime within the search engines. I have a much larger topic than that. My question is at what point is it advisable to create a 'portal' (one mama site and several children) so that all your sites are read to stay on topic - and link to one another? I would like it if the engines could pick up my tier 3 pages individually as "mini topics" around specific products... and then some of the higher tiers could be focussed on larger discussions... I hope my question is clear. So, for instance I am discussing "fishing tools and supplies" (as a hypothetical topic), and interviewing people w different fish stories. This is an example of a large topic with many potential small, relevant and monetizing pages and a variety of suppliers, from lures to boats to vacations to fish recipes.. (this is not my topic but probably a good one!) .

If what youre eventually interested in doing is a really thorough and wonderful large site that is the creme de la creme of fishing how is it recommended that its constructed to show up on only a few words or phrases. Potentially, I could eventually create separate sites for my subtopics as I get more articles and interviews into my site, but I dont see the point now. Would the spiders find the search page about a deep side topic, lets say "underwater cave fishing?"

Also, is it true that the search engines only use a limtied number of search phrases per site?

I dont have muchbackground, so I feel im swimming in murky waters being new... any help with this discussion of potentially large sites with relevant but large sub topics.

Are they advised at all?

Kaspar

[niallr]

Hi Kaspar,

The size of your site is down to you and what structure you want to keep to. The size of the niche really won't reflect on the search engines that much at all - as long as you make your content spiderable, relevant and useful.

If you figured your niche is going to be 1,000 pages then it might be an idea to split it into 2 or 3 smaller sites - just for ease of maintenance.

A figure that's often thrown around is limiting your site to 250 pages - how true that is.... well it's anybodys guess. The main thing is not putting all your eggs in one basket just in case Google changes its mind and your entire site gets hit by an algo change. That's been my experience so far anyways.

Colin McDougalls VEO Report explains a type of site structure that might suit you - building several smaller "sites" within one main one.

Personally I build niche sites that are anywhere from 15 - 100 pages in size. This just suits me from a maintenance point of view and it stops be getting bored building a site on the same topic for months.

Hope that helps. If not ask more questions

Niall

[elanvital]

Hi Niall!

Thanks for replying to my post, which I realize contains several questions!

1.) First an even dumber newbie question. OK. Can a viewer enter through ANY page on a site....? Say on the hypothetical site above, if the viewer has searched for underwater cave fishing, would they find that tier 3 page on the SE?

2.) Do People often start with one site, and split their content into several sites when theybe built up the content? So this portal (I'm not sure if my udnerstanding of it is correct) thing is not generally done? Not cross linking? I have another site idea that I fear might scare the SE's away that combines science and folklore and theology - so it doesnt easily fit excklusively under any major topic, but is equally relevant to all 3.

My interest is being concentrated enough, but also diverse enough so that my own interest is kept to keep it going after 2 years! Anyways, the research continues, I'm sure it will all get sorted eventually!

[niallr]

Hi Kaspar,

There are no dumb questions - there are only questions

1. Yes a potential visitor could enter your site from any page - it all depends on how your pages rank in the search engines at any given point in time.

2. I've split the content from one site into 4 separate sites at one stage just because it made more sense to have them all on their own domain from a tracking and security point of view i.e. one site dies then that's ok because the other 3 keep going.

There's nothing wrong with portal sites as long as they serve an actual purpose. If you just fill the portal site with autogenerated crap then you'll eventually get deindexed and have to start all over again.

Never cross link your sites. It's not worth the potential risk and you can achieve the same results in terms of page rank and backlinks by writing 3 good articles and submitting them to 5 good article directories.

If all the content on the site is relevant to everything else - science, folklore and theology then keep it all there. You can never scare the search engines away by mixing content as long as it's relevant to what your site is about in the "big picture" of things. If your site offers unique content then you're on to a winner straight away with the SEs.

Diversity is good but focus is good too. Maybe have one large site you work on and then 2 or 3 other smaller sites that also hold your interest and give you a "break" from the main site?

One last thing - don't research too long. Even if you only put together 5 pages and get them online then do it. At least the spiders will have some content to spider then and will be waiting for your next batch of content to index it

Hope that helps.

Niall

[boysbach]

Niall I have seen this phrase before but not sure what it means. But what would cross linking mean in real terms?

Thanks

Bev

[niallr]

Hi Bev,

It's kinda hard to explain in words - diagrams always work better in this case - maybe that's just the trainer in me coming out

Ok say you have site A, Site B and Site C

Some people will link all their sites together like so:

A -> B + C
B -> C + A
C -> B + A

You basically wind up with a loop thats meant to pass on PR and link popularity. Small problem - it can get you deindexed so fast your nose will bleed. It's seen as blatant link popularity manipulation (and well it is lol) and Google don't like it. Yahoo and MSN will follow in time.

However if you were to link Site A ONLY to Site B and Site B ONLY to Site C then you'll probably get away with it. Probably.

Spiders can see domains on the same IP address linking to each other so overall it's a tactic best avoided. If you insist on using it then only use one way links to other sites. Never link them all together.

Hope that helps.

Niall

[elanvital]

Hi Naill,

I think you give really good advice. Thanks!
Its really good to know these pitfals before starting in order to not have to deal with damage control later. If my material wants to link to other material that I've written on another site, i will link to that, however, will watch for any loops.

Will also check out the VEO report....

At some point I have to open my hands of all this SEO barriers and respect my material.

I have this wonderful hypertext software (mac only, but will be coming out in PC soon) called Tinderbox as an idea note manager, website creator, database tool, amongst many other uses, I wanted to work with that first before thinking about optimizing anyways! If you are on mac I highly recommend you check it out (no this is not an affiliate plug!)

Best Regards,

Kaspar

[niallr]

Hi Kaspar,

I'm just glad to help people out when they have questions. I know that sometimes it's hard to get an honest answer on questions (not on this forum thankfully) and that some people with online experience would rather sell you a product first and then answer your question later - this is bad karma as far as I'm concerned.

Tindebox sounds like a nice piece of software - hopefully we'll see a PC version at some stage

Take care

Niall

[Jodi]

Hi,

I'm brand new to this affiliate business and I feel very confused. I want to have a site with alot of good content and information along with affiliates to go along with what my content is about. Is cross linking when you link from your site to an affiliates site, or...linking my site to another one of my sites that may be kind of related. Is this what you feel is wrong to do? Is there a difference with the two?

Thanks! And I very much appreciate this forum

[boysbach]

Hi Niall

I'm back asking about cross linking because I don't totally understand it. Thanks for trying to explain it, but there is something in my brain which isn't quite getting it.

I have a site well it is spilt into two sites one for the UK and one for USA. I have both on the navigation is that OK.

Also we are just about to do a travel site, could we not link that from our travel page.

Sorry didn't explain our main site is a shopping mall type site.

Also we will be focusing on certain niches so again couldn't we link them to the correct page. I mean if one was on diet and fitness to that page in our shopping mall.

I really do appreciate all your help.

Maybe you could take a quick look and see what I mean

Bev

www.robbev.com (USA site)
http://uk.robbev.com (UK) will be getting the .co.uk once it is available

[niallr]

Hi Bev,

Not to worry about the extra questions.

Ok your current site is split into two. Linking them both together from the navigation menu could be seen as link manipulation. Basically every page on both sites are linking to each other from the navigation menu - every page on your site is crosslinked.

Will this cause you problems? That's a hard one to answer. If both sites are interlinked with every single page and they both share basically the same content it could cause you problems. I can see why you would want to link the sites together in the way you have but you're always better off just linking from the UK to the UK site or vice versa. Keep them as independent from each other as possible and then you don't need to worry about the search engines at all. Even on subdomains at the moment treat them as separate sites - the search engines will.

As for the travel site and linking. It if makes sense for you to provide a link for a visitor to this site then do. Just make its a one way link i.e. from your shopping mall site to the travel site (but not back to the shopping mall).

If you're building separate sites to link to your shopping mall site then again make the links one way - from the niche site to the shopping mall and no more than that. Also it might be an idea to host these other niche sites elsewhere - a host with a totally different IP ideally.

When I build a site thats related to another site I have then I'll add one single oneway link to the new site for a few weeks and then remove it once the spiders are at the new site and I'm getting traffic (to be honest you can do this for about 5 days and it'll work) and I also add a link from my partners/links/useful website page to the new site but leave that there permanently. I've never had any search engine problems doing this as the sites are related, the links make sense to have there for the visitor and I don't spam the engines with crosslinking.

I hope the above makes sense? If not ask more questions

Be good

Niall

[niallr]

Hi,

I can only ever speak from personal experience on these things so I don't want to saying anything is wrong. Personally I believe that trying to manipulate search engines is a just a waste of time is all. I am not a "guru" type believe me

Now if you're building a content site and want to have lots of links to affiliate sites that's absolutely no problem. I think that's what you meant in your question? If so then link to as many affiliate sites as you wish If not let me know what I missed out on in your question.

As for linking sites together. If the sites are truly related and will prove useful to your visitor then yes absolutely include a link. If they're not related then why are you adding a link? To get spidered? To increase Pagerank? If you just want to attract the search engines to the other site then just write a 400 - 500 word article on a topic for the site and submit it to the top 5 or 10 article directores and just let that do the work for you instead. Zero risk and totally effective.

Basically don't link sites together unless you have a good reason to. Search engines are getting much smarter and the days of crosslinking sites for search engine success are pretty much over.

Hope that helps.

Niall

[boysbach]

Hi Niall

Thanks it does make sense what you are saying. I can understand why some people would do it, a bit like a certain guru who I bought some ebooks from with keywords and I sat therre shaking my little head wondering how on earth certain words were relevant to the book being sold. I think it was over 20 pages of keywords and the suggestion was to do a PPC for each word, yet right put the money into google's pocket.

Back to my site. The pages on my shopping site are basically different, because the affiliates on each page will depend on which country you are buying from. My logic was this I have two site but one domain name, and if someone arrives at my USA site and wants to shop from the UK click on the link to UK and then shop from there. None of the other links are going to take you back and forth to the sites. I originally checked out a number of shopping malls who are high in the search engines like on page one and they all seem to have done this. If I have an article on both sites then I have them on both sites, not linking back. When I built them I built 2 sites so I have to go to the UK to make changes, and the same with the US.
That was my plain simple logic on this one.

Thanks for the tip about the linking of our other sites as they become relevant.

Bev

[richerbrat]

Hi there. I have one site that it is over 200 pages long, and how deep the links go etc is really not worth sweating over. I am just trying to convert that site over to XSitePro and it is a real chore trying to set it all out, as it was badly laid out before!

I think the most important thing is ensuring that your site is easy to navigate, and that the things you are selling are easy to find. Believe me, when I first built that site, I used to get lost in it myself, and my newsletter was like a guide map, because nobody could find things otherwise.

So do aim for ease of use, rather than anything else. And do bear in mind that when your site starts to get really big, even checking all your links are still working can be a massive chore.

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hello All,

Kaspar, you made the comment: