Should You Link Between Adsense Sites?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Wow this week flew by. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday. This whole week has been a blur of new site creation. I can’t remember the last time I had so many tests running. It’s going to be an interesting next couple of weeks as results start trickling in; stay tuned!
Today I want to talk about linking between different Adsense sites.
Most of us run more than one website. Heck, I run several thousand of them. One of the factors that Google considers when ranking a website is the number of links pointing to each website.
That begs the question: does linking between your own sites increase your search engine rankings?
In the past, the answer was an emphatic NO! Google looked at this sort of thing as artificial linking and took action against sites that engaged in it. You might have heard the term “link wheel” before.
A link wheel is really just a fancy way of passing link juice between sites that you own. Site A links to Site B who links to Site C who links to Site D who links to Site A thus forming a wheel or circle.
It used to work…now it can get you into serious trouble.
Yes, sometimes it “can” be “ok” to link between sites. For instance, if you own 5 espresso machine websites, it might be ok to link between them. After all, if someone is visiting one of your espresso websites, they might find the info on another of your espresso sites useful too.
But it’s tricky and I’ve always just advised people not to bother. The benefits aren’t that great and the potential for deindexing can be quite high.
We’re living in a whole new world since Google’s Penguin update. No one really knows what’s right or wrong anymore. So I’ve decided to do a little experiment.
In the last few days I’ve created about 500 new websites. Some of them are slightly related, but most of them are not. They all resemble shopping websites where you can buy products, do price comparison, find deals, etc.
On the left hand side of each page of each website I have a simple site menu, and under the menu I’ve put 50 links to 50 of those new sites. But I put a bit of a spin on it (literally).
What I did was chop the links to those 500 new websites into groups of 50. Since I built 500 sites, that means there’s 10 sets of links (with 50 links per set).
On each page I wrote a little snippet of php code to randomly select one of those lists of 50 links, and display them on the page underneath the left side site menu.
So basically every time a page on any of those sites loads, a randomly selected list of 50 links appears on the left hand side. At the top of the list I wrote something like “If you enjoyed this website, you might like one of these:” and the anchor text I used for each link is the main keyword of each particular site.
I have no idea! Google might decide that the whole thing is an attempt to artificially link to each page. They might think it’s a type of link wheel. If that happens, you can bet that all 500 of those sites will get de-indexed.
But I don’t think that will happen. I can’t explain why, but I have a feeling that it’s going to do well. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Giving Google links to all 500 sites is just giving them a list of my websites that they can mass deindex, right? Most people go out of their way to reduce their site footprint to make it as hard as possible for Google to determine that you own a set of sites.
But I’ve never been worried about that because Google already knows which sites you own…because you put adsense ads on every page of every site. So they’ve already got your footprint.
So I wouldn’t worry about that.
Will this test work? I don’t know…but I’ll report back as soon as I have any hard data.
That’s all for today…Keep on Building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
