Link building strategy - black hat or white hat?

[leonenobleseate]

I have a competitor who always ranks very on alot keywords relevant to our business and using Open Site Explorer I note they have a tremendous amount of links.  I also noticed that it appears their web company has gone out and set up numerous websites with relevant content, and then have linked back to the competitors main site.  Is this kosher?  I ask because before I settled on my current domain name, I purchased several keyword rich domain names; should I be thinking of setting up websites with relevant (and original) content and link back to my main site?

[ninjamarketer]

I would certainly rate this strategy as grey if not black and avoid it. This is one of the area in search marketing where lot of sites tend to get away with but may soon face consequences. SEO / Link building companies mainly located overseas rely on this technique heavily.

It is definitely painful and unfair when a competitor with spam links ranks well for highly competitive keywords set while a professional SEO spends months working hard playing the clean game. However, the reward from white hat is unmatched.

One last thing that I would like to point out is links from website hosted on the same IP blocks are less valuable links from different IP blocks. This is same as the domain diversity concept.

[eyepaq]

I am doing the same thing for several projects. If done with extra care there is nothing wrong with it.

There is no black and white hat seo - there are no clear rules - we're all cowboys.

There is nothing white with anything we do - [natural links]  is ... white - and that is not sustained by anyone - it's just natural - it happens. If you have the best site ever you don't need SEO to improve the traffic and make it look natural as you force it

If you have good domains you can build quality content sites and use a solid and not aggressive link building techniques to your main site. You must however host those satellite domains on different hosting accounts (different IPs).

In my opinion this strategy works and works great. It will give you more options in the Search results, options that you can control and it will rise your main domain because of the links that will point to this domain.

However is time consuming as you need to do SEO sessions for each satellite but is worth it, especially if you have great domain names for those satellites websites.

There are a few things you should consider (again, this is just a suggestion):

1. Don't host the satellites on the same IP class.

2. Don't use one page / Landing page and link  to your main domain.

3. Treat them as independent projects with separate accounts on Social networks, blogs, submit articles to digg or whatever in each site name.

4. Build links to those satellites - you can risk some shady techniques as the risk is not as high as with the main brand.

5. Don't place junk or duplicate content but if  you do make sure it's from your competitor as maybe you will outrank them in the future - just kidding on the last part... or not ?

I don't think this technique can be called spam if you do build good content sites on those satellites and use the juice to boost your main brand.

[StalkerB]

Not black hat, but on the other hand, perhaps not worth it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

But if you go for it, then eyepaq has a lot of good advice.

[Guest]

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[UPform5]

Its all natural to me, I think that a white hat, gray hat or black hat depends on the intention of the webmaster. If those micro sites don't encroach on any google guidelines then it is okay. ^_^

[leonenobleseate]

Thanks everyone for the answers; they were all extremely helpful.

[moldybacon]

great advice, how many satellite sites would you recommend?

10 or so?

[eyepaq]

That depends on your time and resources to build and market them - better to go with a solid single one then 10 weak ones.

Best scenario is 10+ solid ones

[iAnalyst.com]

I would agree but I'd add a limit to how many satellite sites you create. Google is a registrar and they could possibly find out about these sites. So don't use this as your main link strategy by any means. We usually create 4-5 satellite sites (wordpress blogs) and do what the above poster suggested.

[gmellak]

We've seen a great potential here with some of our projects' competitors and are also thinking that there's a point to go for this strategy ... as long as you're not promoting one site that then links to your main site, but use your satellite sites to promote the main site, I believe there's a good potential.