0 Links Across Multiple Domain Names

Links Across Multiple Domain Names

This is search engine optimization tip number twenty four in our continuing series of SEO tips. All of our search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific, they should not take too much time to review (to make sure that you are following the search engine optimization best practices), and will be rather “short and sweet” and directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with your links: spread your link footprint across multiple domain names.

Not following along with our Search Engine Optimization Tips? Our last last three search engine optimization tips were about issuing a press release, link building using coupons and understanding redirects and the type of redirects you can use to direct traffic to your site or to another site if you change your site’s location or a page’s location (its URL) Before that, I talked about search engine optimization tip 20, was about checking the whois of your domain name: checking the public domain record. Before that, in search engine optimization tip 19, was about code bloat and moving your JavaScript code to an external file. And before that, I wrote search engine optimization tip 18, which was about linking within sentences. There are a lot more search engine optimization tips coming in the future. In fact, to keep up with these SEO tips you might want to subscribe to our SEO RSS Feed.

This search engine optimization tip is probably something that you have not heard before: make sure you spread the links to your site out: it’s often better to have links from multiple domain names and not just a few domain names. In fact, it’s most often preferable to have 10 links from 10 different web sites than 100 links from 5 different web sites.

Take a look at the links that are going to your web site. There are, in fact, a lot of free seo tools out there that will show you the links to your web site. You can even verify your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google allow you to download a spreadsheet of all of your links (it typically will be about a month old). And I especially like to perform a search like this at Yahoo! or use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get a list of links.

However you get your list of links, you will need to analyze them in a unique way. Don’t just look at the links, look at how many different domain names are represented on the list. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How many different domain names are represented on the list of links to your site?
• Are there a lot of links coming from a few select domain names?
• How many of the links are coming from a web site’s home page? (e.g., domain.com versus domain.com/page.html)
• Are there any web sites linking to you that have hundreds of links (or more?) from internal web pages?
• Of those web sites linking to you that have hundreds or more links from internal web pages, do all those links have to same link text? The same anchor text? Can you get that anchor text changed?
• Are those multiple links from the same domain name(s) really necessary?

What your focus here should be is this: concentrate on the links from web sites’ home pages (typically these are the web sites’ most powerful pages). You do not necessarily need a link from thousands of web pages on a web site (unless you’re running a banner ad on that site or some other type of promotion). In fact, one link from a web site’s home page can be more important than hundreds or even thousands of links from the same web site.

So, when you are looking at your list of links, look for something that will stick out like a sore thumb: hundreds or even thousands of links from the same domain name pointing to your web site. Re-evaluate some of the “site wide” links that you have: and if you can get a home page link instead then you might just be better off.