Network of related sites and Ranking on Google

Dilution, Penalty, or Opportunity?

[ryanandrew81]

I have a network of 25 unique health sites with good original content all hosted on the same IP. On each site there is an index of links to the other 25.

After the first update most sites had a PR of 5 or 4. Unfortunately we are no showing up in the search engines for the keywords in our domain...ex: examplecommunity, example2community, etc.

Do you think that network the sites dilutes the page rank from some of the more popular sites, are we being penalized, and is their an opportunity to leverage this network of sites to promote on or two of the bunch. Thank you for your feedback and advice.

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:03 pm (utc) on May 25, 2006]
[edit reason] Examplified examples. [/edit]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, Ryan.

You said "after the first update" - that makes me wonder how long these domains have been online. Are you familiar with the "sandbox effect" and could that be part of what you see happening?

Also, it's probably quite clear to Google that your sites are related -- do you have more independent inbound links to each domain than you have IBLs from your own network? That ratio can be an important scoring factors.

[ryanandrew81]

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond, I'm excited to be a part of this forum. There has been link building for 4 of the sites with only relevant links and at a slow and organic speed. Do you think the other 20 sites that have no links from outside the network could be dead weight for the sites we are working on? I'm considering pointing all the links at one site and removing the index of websites that is on each page. Thanks for the great feedback. What would you do in this case?

[tedster]

That kind of advice is not something I would give casually or without significant analysis -- each situation is so different. I would, in general, suggest that you leave the crosslinking as it is if it's there to help your visitors. If it's there only to try for rankings in Google, then I would probably back off, especially from any run-of-site crosslinking. Keep links only where they matter for your visitors and are pointing to related topics, in other words.

But in any case, definitely keep working with your content to attract more natural and independent links (and traffic) to all your domains. You can't force it and have much long term success these days. Also, look at everything about your domains that we talk about here. Unique urls for each bit of content, well structured in-site navigation, and in general generating every sign of quality that you can muster.