What is the Value?

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I own a website (non-commercial) which has around 300 pages full of original content, in average about 500 words or so per page. I also own another website (commercial) I was thinking of pointing keywords for all of these pages in the non-commercial website pointing to the commercial website, all the articles are around 2-10 years old, what is the value of doing this sort of link building?

Kind Regards,

[RobertFisher]

Gary,

This is a bit over broad, but I will attempt to assist you. You have a site that you have for some reason other than commercial. You also have a commercial site. You want to point keywords from non to other. (I am assuming you mean link to other from this on keyword relevant pages). You desire to do this to add value if possible to commercial site.

Given that there are some considerations: If they are on the same C block or IP address it will effect how much juice you get. Also, if they are only loosely related, ultimately there will be less value and all the linking norms must be followed to achieve whatever you are able to achieve at a max.

Now, the real issue is the content is 2 to 10 years old which would seem to mean you are doing nothing with the site at the moment. If that is so, I think you would be better served to go another direction.

Assuming the site serves no current or important purpose or that the commercial site could take up that slack, you could do a 301 redirect of the pertinent pages of non comm to comm. This would assist you in a couple of ways: you have one less site to worry about (soon), you are able to take the link value of non comm and send it to comm with less than a ten percent loss on that value, there is no IP or C block issue or same owner issue, over a month to three or four you will see the value of non comm positively effect commercial.

Again, as with linking, you must follow the norms of 301 redirect like url to url in .htaccess and not domain to domain, etc.

If I failed in the details of what you wanted, I apologize and would take another stab if I knew the urls or more details.

Best.

[Paul78]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your reply.

This website was used to support a magazine which was distributed throughout the UK once a month, whatever was written for the magazine, this was replicated on the non-commercial website, the reason for the non-commercial website was due to legalities, the content could not be used on the commercial website, hope that makes sense.

The website is not on the same IP address. Depending on the article itself for example lets say it was talking about Colds & Flu, the anchor text for this article was relate to cold & flu.

Yes, the website has had no contribution for over 2 years now, due to the magazine no longer being published, however my thinking is that with the article being original and the length of time they have been online, surely this has some value?

I hope this clears things up a little.

Thanks

[marcinlejman]

You have not provided enough information to answer this question.

Robert has already indicated some unclear points (the same IP C-class or not?), and there are more, like domain ownership (if both domains have the same owner, backlinks value will be lowered).

Additionally, we know nothing about the strength of your non-commercial site (if you at least quoted some stats from the Open Site Explorer, we could help you more).

Generally, you could gain some benefit, but I would not expect it to be earth-shattering, unless your non-commercial site is really strong.

In link building, distribution of your backlinks among many domains is very important. You need various backlinks from different sources to really feel the difference in rankings.

[Paul78]

Hi Marcin,

Thanks for your reply.

I pointed out that this domain is not on the same IP address

The non-commercial domain has a domain authority of 46, it has 61 linking root domains, 151 external links. Although not great reading, it attracts over 40,000 visits from natural search (Mainly Google) so from this alone with not many external links pointing at the website, the articles surely have value or authority from Google, an example being one of the pages is no.1 for a particular keywords attracting over 4,000 visits from natural search and this page has no external links pointing at it.

Hopefully this sheds a little light on what value the website has.

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

For a magazine not published in two years i can only say wow.

I would not 301 given this data (yes, more info could change that, but I doubt it). I would look to do two things:

Discover where the traffic is coming from and why and see if there is a way to captitalize on it or improve it. Then, I would institute a good linking strategy going url to url as opposed to pushing all to home page of commercial site. Make sure the anchor text is good, links come from content above the fold where possible (Don't do footer, sidebar links out of convenience, take the time). I would do around 30 to 40 links per month just because I like a slower approach and the ability to change my approach based on new info.

For a good primer on anchor text, Here is a Whiteboard on anchor text from Rand Fishkin 

Hope this helps you out, would love to be posted as you watch it, even if just by PM. What I do on projects like these is get a baseline using campaigns and then evaluate it weekly or monthly as I add. For a total site 301 url to url, I watch both sites and graph the result so that we learn from it.

If you are up to it, and you take a road similar or somewhat different and keep all your results, you could write a blog by simply stating the question, the answers, what you did, and then the results over time. In three or four months, you would have a great piece.

Best to you.