Building a Website Galaxy
Alright it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post. A long while. Been very very very very busy on both good and bad things. Nothing can ever be easy!
One project I’m working on focuses on a very tight niche. Actually, it focuses on a single product… with huge potential. I have about 20 domains for this one product and I mapped out a linking structure to try and filter link juice directly to one main site while monetizing all 20 sites. I’ve been debating the idea for awhile, talked to a few people about structure and breaking up IPs and then read a few pages of an e-book which I think coined the term Mini-Net (can’t remember the title/author). In any case, here is a glimpse into exactly what I’m doing:
Obviously, the network has 1 main site which you can think of as the center of the website galaxy I am creating. Actually, I like that distinction more than mini-net, because of how my specific network actually works. This main site is the sun and hopefully it will show me the light (and the money). Orbiting this main site are my “planet sites” - I have 3 of them. The linking pattern is clockwise, so Planet 1 links to Planet 2, Planet 2 links to Planet 3 and Planet 3 links to Planet 1. This ensures there aren’t any recipricol links… they are all coming from a unique site that provides a one way link.
Now, each of these “Planet Sites” also has websites that revolve around IT, much like the earth has a moon and some planets have many moons. Let’s call these “Moon Sites”. I’ve got 16 domains left for “Moon Sites” and I split them up evenly, and randomly, amongst each of my planets so each planet has about 5 moons. The linking strategy remains the same but is contained within each Planet. So, Planet 1 might have Moon A, B, C, D and E. The linking pattern would be:
Moon A > Moon B > Moon C > Moon D > Moon E > Moon A
And, each moon links directly to it’s planet site. Confused? Hopefully the image below will clear everything up:
In addition to this structure… EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE, INCLUDING ALL PLANETS AND ALL MOONS WILL LINK DIRECTLY TO THE MAIN SUN SITE.
Now, no single site is whoring out links but rather has 2 links… 1 to the next moon or planet in rotation and 1 to the main site. You can put these links in a blogroll or sidebar link list AND in the content linking to deeper pages in the site. Round it out nicely.
But, we’ve still got a couple factors left to address:
Different IPs
We know that to some extent, Google may punish sites or at least discount links based on IPs and whatnot. Who knows, but what I did was put all Moon sites on 1 IP, all Planet sites on 1 IP and the Sun site on another IP. This splits it up decently… I didn’t put a WHOLE lot of effort into thinking this through but at least it’s not all coming from ONE IP.
Different Content
We’ve got to have unique content on each site. Great, that oughta be fun. I started with my main site and tried to make it pretty thorough. My planet sites will be paraphrasing and rewriting, trying to use a different “voice and style”. I’ll also try to break it up and organize it differently. Or, maybe take a completely different approach on the material. Maybe one site will be a “store front” type of site while another site might be “Joe Shmoe” who is an Ultra Product Obsessive Fan who writes about how much he loves the product, sleeps with it at night and all the great things he does with it. The Moon Sites I care much less about so some of them will be automated RSS posting sites, using different feeds from different sources, some will be regurgitate content but they will be much less “quality”… I’m mainly concerned with getting something set up and getting it set up quickly.
Different Templates
I’m setting up about 70% of my sites with wordpress, never using the same theme more than twice and when I do that, it will be customized a bit differently. And, if I do reuse them they will be from moons on different planets. The rest will be Photoshop -> ImageReady -> Dreamweaver sites. I’m not really a web developer so these 2 methods will have to do. Sorry ’bout it.
Organization
I use Excel to keep track of my progress. Take a look at an example:
| SUN SITE |
I know to link the planets left to write and the moon sites top to bottom. When I finish a site I will highlight the cell in a color. If I have unfinished business I’ll leave a comment on the cell - a great feature in excel so you can see what you have left to do simply by mousing over.
My Current Progress
Actually, the reason I’m making this post is because I am stalled! My new hosting accounts for the Planet and Moon IPs are up, but they only allow me to install Wordpress 2.1 which has the security flaws. Sooooo I asked them to fix it and now my hosting is pretty much down on those accounts. But, at least it gave me some time to hit you all up with an update and possibly some ideas for your own sites.
I’ve currently got my main site and about 3 other sites in the network done. Once I finish posting this I’m going to hunt down which RSS feeds I want to use for my Moon Sites.
Here goes nothing!
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5 Responses to “Building a Website Galaxy”
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Best of luck — let us know how it goes! Presently, my Website Plate of Spaghetti and Meatballs is not really working out…
wow confusing, especially since I don’t know what your websites are about… gotta talk to you more about this..
sounds cool though
sounds cool. I have a similar network to this one in that there are many moons each rotating around their own planet but each site I have is also directly linked to the Sun site, it doesn’t matter what the websites are about, they all link to the Sun site (main home).
As a finishing touch, add some interplanetary war that destroyed planets and moons at random, add a few alone sites that are waiting to be linked back to the sun or to some planets and that’s my network.
[...] while ago, the old simian read Rob’s description of his website galaxy concept over at his blog [...]
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