Build a Link Network of Support Sites

A. Avoiding backlink footprints

1. Chances of 2 interlinked sites to have natural links from the same C-class are slim, from same IP are very close to zero. Get one different C-class IP for each site, unless they are not all using AdSense or are interlinked. This is critical! Do link analysis on successful sites and you will see the inbound link IP/domain ratio is high. If you think IPs don’t matter, you’re simply wrong. Very wrong! Google “seo hosting” to find offers. Make sure they have a different DNS & RDNS server for each C-class.
2. Use domain privacy, or even better, fake WHOIS data. Do NOT use fake WHOIS data on important/main domains, however. Just for support sites.
3. Do not interlink sitewide. Interlink from the post/text, using very few links from a site to other (e.g. on a 50 page blog put only 2-5 links towards other blog in the network, 2-5 towards blog2, 2-5 towards blog3, etc).
4. Send links to your competitor’s sites but use a keyword that you are either to small to rank for in the next 6-12 months or a poisoned keyword (e.g. “CompetitorSiteName’s calculator” instead of “mortgage calculator”).
5. From some of the blogs link to a few other only with generic words (e.g. here/click here/see here/on this post/this site and so on).
6. From some of the blogs link sitewide (from blogroll) to your competitor’s site but with their site’s name not a keyword.
7. From some of your blogs, link to other blogs in your network from the blogroll/sitewide but make those NOFOLLOW. Add a few other links there (useful ones) towards other sites that are not yours (so that link doesn’t stand out). While that link is nofollow, you will still link from the posts with **************** links.
8. In some posts put some text from other of your blogs in BLOCKQUOTE tags and below add a link to the source page. This way it looks very legit – you used some text from there and you are linking to the source.
9. Pick a few of the blogs and make them stronger than the others. If you have a 100 blogs network, make about 5 of them a bit stronger than the rest.
10. Do not interlink every site with every other site. If you have a 100 site network group link sources in blog batches like 1-20, 13-30, 27-35, 30-60, 42-65, etc. Random is the name of the game. By all means, don’t stick to round numbers and fixed ranges just because they are easier to remember and do math with them.
11. Build both the sites and the links over time. One year is a good time frame. Don’t be eager to “make money fast and easy” as there is no such thing. You need infrastructure and that takes time to develop. 100 sites all launched and index for first time within a week is a huge footprint. To optimize the whole process, assuming you can generate a lot of sites in a short period of time, go in many niches. That way, while you won’t get the network to make you money faster, after a year you will have several networks not just one.

B. CMS

1. Use different themes (different HTML, CSS and permalinks)
2. Don’t use shitty themes. Try to find at least decent looking themes because you want to be able to convert your visitors and low-quality looking sites kinda make people run away because they don’t inspire trust.
3. Have a backend system to manage all of the sites from one centralized interface. Ideally you should be able to install a new site with the click of a button. I can’t recommend you one as usually I code my own shit to be 100% to my specifications.
4. Have an automatic interlinker with 2 components:
1. Server – has a centralized database with all the keywords for that niche/market/project paired with URLs of pages targeting them (from all the blogs) and rules regarding which sites can get interlinked and which don’t (interlink groups/site batches that I talked about in section A.9).
2. Client – can be a custom coded WordPress plugin if you’re using that as a blog CMS. It should request the list of keyword/URL pairs from the central server and match them with the post text to turn the keywords in the text into links automatically.

C. Content

1. You can automatically generate content, use spun content, mixed content, etc. but you really have to know how to do it otherwise you can pretty much fail. The safe way is to use manually written unique content. I use a mic of all. For spun content, the bigger your seed article is, the higher the number of spins is. And that is not linear. Using fictive numbers here, if for example from 1000 words seed article you can generate 20 posts, from 10000 words seed you might be able to generate 600 posts. Just remember that it pays to do it right.
2. Have a centralized interface to manage the content, know what is posted where, who wrote it, when it was wrote, etc. If you’re outsourcing content writing, you can have the workers login here and they don’t even have to know what sites you own (unless they know how to do an exact match search on google ).
3. Mix the length of the content both within a site and across the network. For example have a site with average post length 300 words and another one with average length 1000 words. This is t further avoid patterns.
4. Personally, I want to make money with my support sites, even if just a little. That is why I advise to post content that is decent. Since you’re investing time in developing this network, it makes sense to make it of decent quality, so that in time you can upgrade these sites from “support sites” to “money sites”.
5. Remember I was saying in section A.9 that you should make some sites stronger? Those should include more content than the rest and cover more keywords, and more difficult keywords (even if you won’t rank too high with them).

D. External links

1. Focus on **************** links. I’ve seen some posts from people saying **************** help as well. I don’t agree. I mean, they might help a bit, but very little compared to ****************. I am ranking #5 for a tier-1 keyword with only 700 links. The site below me has 12,000 links, most of them nofollow. You do the math.
2. Build links gradually over time. If in first month you created 100 links, make sure next month you can create a close number. Don’t blast 2000 links overnight and next month build none.
3. Vary anchor text a lot. And I mean a lot. For the more powerful sites that I was talking about in sections A.9 and C.5, make sure to have a good amount of keyword-targeted links for those more difficult keywords.
4. Focus on specific keywords. This might seem like I am contradicting point (3) above but I am not. You have to vary anchor text across the network, but focus specific keywords/relevance on the graph paths that lead to your money site’s pages targeting them.
5. Analyze your competitor’s backlinks in detail. See the IP/domain ratio, nofollow/**************** ratio (so you know how many links really matter), type of links (blogroll, post, etc. – you can custom code page/link analyzers if you have the skills for it), etc. Get to know your competitor’s backlinks better than they do.
6. Do link exchanges the smart way. No reciprocal. You have the leverage of a large network so use that to your advantage. Give a link from a support site in exchange of a link to your money site(s) or some other support site. Give links from several PR2 support sites to a guy that has a PR5 site so he gets a good deal. You need to link to others anyway to avoid footprints, so get something out of it.
7. Vary the types of links you get. Don’t do just blog commenting or just forum posting, or just article directories.
8. Vary the link sources. Just like you are not interlinking every site in the network with every other site, do not get the same external links for every site. If for example you have access to a pool of 1000 links, don’t build 1000 links towards every site, but 40-100 per site, so that a site has links that other site doesn’t.

E. Do NOT!

1. Do not use AdSense, Analytics, Webmaster Tools or any other Google service on the sites in the network. As a matter of fact avoid any 3rd party services that have a common footprint (e.g. being a publisher on a PPC network with one affiliate code for all your sites).
2. Do not hurry the process (build the network too fast). As tempting as it may be, it is not worth it in the long run.
3. Don’t use link wheels. They are one of the easiest to detect interlinking footprints. There are link schemes that somewhat resemble link wheels and work, but a link wheel that you can draw on paper and looks organized/structured/symmetrical as opposed to chaotic is very likely going to be detected.