How to best use my secondary related website to benefit me the most?

[Anon]

Hi guys,

I have my main online store but then also a lot of information websites about the brands which I sell - basically owning the brands domain in my country. Some of these are PR 1-3, some with 0 but I have not done any advertising for them. Some of the pages are also well ranked (top 3 positions for primary keywords). Can I get some suggestions on the best way to use these to advantage my main site. I have them all on a different hosting account (so different nameservers and IP address). For example, would it be best to have 1 page (such as a 'Stocklist' page) that links to my main store, or should I have a banner or footlink on each individual page advertising my main store?

One of my main competitors that is ranked very well has his online store website but nearly all of his backlinks come from his unrelated forum that he also owns where he has a banner advertising his online store on every post and page. Is this is the best way to do?

Any advise would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[aakk9999]

These brand sites - are they getting much traffic? You say these are information sites - can you somehow lead visitors to your online store from there? Or are these sites capturing visitors in much earlier stage of buying cycle?

Why are they ranking? Are they EMD/PMD sites? Or so well written information sites?

Have you thought of taking one of information sites and merging it as a section on your main online store domain. Redirect the relevant pages to newly created pages on your online store and see if the ranking/traffic still sticks. If it does, then you could slowly do it with other well-performing pages on other sites. It could be easier to lead the visitor towards the purchase from within the same site than sending them from a different site.

all of his backlinks come from his unrelated forum that he also owns where he has a banner advertising his online store on every post and page. Is this is the best way to do?

I would not do this. I think the risk is too big. Also, you cannot be sure that this is the why your competitor is ranking.

[Anon]

aakk9999 - Thank you for your reply. Compared to my main site, I would say the traffic is acceptable. In the menu of each page there is an ‘Order’ or ‘Stockist’ type heading and on that page there is a link to my main site. This is working well and I would say about 20% of my orders are coming from these sites.

They are EMD domains but with helpful information on them. Although I have noticed a few have dropped a bit in rankings literally over the past week. For some of the brands/pages particularly, I find them important because they contain a lot more information than that what I can hold on my main site without it looking messy.

[aakk9999]

In that case I would leave them as a separate sites and perhaps improve on sites themselves. Looking what pages have dropped, beefing up the content a bit or trimming down dead wood content and similar.

[aristotle]

Anon wrote:
In the menu of each page there is an ‘Order’ or ‘Stockist’ type heading and on that page there is a link to my main site.

If these links to your main site are dofollow links, then you're clearly in violation of Google's guidelines.

Creating a lot of "satellite" websites and then linking them to your main site is just a sophisticated "disguised" method of artificial link building. Many big companies do it, in some cases creating hundreds of these satellite sites and then linking them to their main site. Just like you, they put each satellite site on a different server to make the scheme harder to detect. These companies also build artificial backlinks to the satellite sites so that they will have pagerank to pass to the main site (I suspect that you have done this too).

This scheme is nearly always successful (so far) IF DONE PROPERLY, and shows that Google can definitely be tricked. But because it takes a lot of money and resources, it's mostly only large companies who are able to do it on a big scale. But your case shows that it can also work on a smaller scale.

[Anon]

I appreciate the advice. Didn't realise it was that bad.

This is ahrefs graph of my competitor... this has worked very well for him. But would you say it's just a matter of time till Google notices?

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