Reciprocal links / seo satellite

[daan.loening]

Hi guys,

I am reasonably new to SEO. We operate a site. Lets call it brand.com.

I would like to build up SEO juice and traffic for our site reasonably quickly, but with a view to not harming us in the long term.

There are a large number of very small blogs in our space (> 100). Many of them are private blogs. I would like to gain links from these blogs.

None of these blogs will send large amounts of traffic to our site on an individual basis, but in sum they provide both decent traffic and SEO juice.

Leaving SEO out of mind I would offer them all returning links in exchange for linking to our blog (brand.com/blog) or our main domain (brand.com). They are decent quality sites that may be of interest to our users. They are not competitors and will not take any of our business away.

Problem: I want to avoid being punished by Google for link exchange. In an ideal world I would event like to profit from these links from a SEO perspective.

I have thought of a work around, but am not sure whether this will work at all.

I will create 3 satellite pages: brand-partners.com, brand-tips.com and brand-blog-roll.com.

I will feature links to these three sites prominently on my main site and my blog. This will provide these three sites with some SEO juice and trust from bloggers.

In return for linking to my site, I will offer the small blogs links from these three "satellite" pages. I will try to diffuse the picture by adding some random links and obtaining some random links that I don't link back to.

My approach is to always provide value to our users. Apart from the diffusing bit above I would say that creating these small hubs provides value (as we recommend valuable sites), while still enabling us to have some SEO effect.

As I am reasonably new to SEO, I don't know whether the above is already a standard tactic employed or whether it contains some horrible pitfall that I should be aware of.

I would be very thankful for any tips or feedback!

Thank you and all the best,

Daan

[KaneJamison]

It will take a lot of work on your part to build up a bunch of satellite sites that is important enough for those bloggers to care about. While it could work eventually, I think it's a lot of work when you could be working on better strategies with those sites.

Keep in mind that if there really are only about 100 of these sites, that's not many. If you go around giving them the idea that you're a spammy or low-quality brand, then they'll never trust you, and you will have burned any possibility of a future relationship.

Rather than trying to exchange link for link, try something like this:

• Offer them something else of value: write a guest post for them, interview them and publish it on your site or somewhere else.
• Trade them some of your product that they can use for a giveaway or review. If you're content-based site that isn't selling anything, then this one's off the table.
• If you already have a big social following, you could try offering them a social mention of their site: post them on your brand's Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account. This is only going to work if you have a good size following; if you have 23 Facebook fans it'll be an insult to them.

In general, embrace the concept of giving and they will all start returning the favor. Start talking them up in your Twitter feed and linking to content they're publishing and they'll notice. Then, after warming the relationship, you can start finding ways to partner with them. The link should be something that you ask for after other communication, not at the beginning.