Hey guys. I'm thinking about building an authority site in a niche that I have come across, however I have a few questions: 1. Can you have 1 paragraph of "instructions" or "information" that is on like 500 pages? Along with other content of course. My question is, will these pages ever rank? Is it bad to do this? 2. Even though a site is new, can it reach a trusted status with Google quickly? I will have hundreds of pages, and I don't feel much like buying backlinks for each page. Can I backlinks the pages with the best keywords and expect the rest to rank? Or doesn't it work that way? Thanks!
1) As long as the content of each page is substantially unique you can get away with a small amount of dupe content on each page. If it's really an issue then render the dupe content with javascript for the surfer's benefit, or turn it into an image. 2) The only way to get trusted status quickly is to get quality hard links from trusted authority sites. Buying links is an option here. For example, sometimes a university might launch a new program on a .org domain, but it will be heavily backlinked from the .edu as well as other authority pages like press releases newspapers, so it will rank quickly and be largely immune to spammy-looking high velocity link growth. Of course, you can't really tell whether a site is "trusted" or not. I'd also point out that in purist SE research terms, "authority" is something that is conferred by backlinks, not by the content of the site. Of course, those links probably come from the quality content of the site. However just because you build a site that is authoritative within its niche in terms of information, that doesn't mean you actually have an "authority site." Most people you see on boards talking about authority sites are actually talking about something different from what they think they're talking about. Check out the original hubs and authorities algo for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
Thanks for the advice Autumn, I was thinking of adding hundreds of pages, since they are all downloads. Would picking 40 keywords each month and linkpushing them be enough to get each page ranked? I mean these aren't hard keywords. Traffic Travis sees them as "relatively easy" or "easy", I just don't know if one Link push per keyword is enough to outrank what is there.
Wulfie - check your PM for a couple of my authority sites. Content is more important than backlinking (and I am in the backling business). Content, content and more content will get you ranked.
Good points. I totally agree. How could google know whether your site is authority or not? If google gives credit for spun garbage, they cannot tell whether your content is good. The only signals google could use are the links going to your site, right?
Authority and trusted sites are different. 1. Authority = a lot of sites in your niche link to you. You are the headquarters in that niche, 2. Trust = Google believes your site will never link to spam. Anyway, as far as building trusted sites, you can gain trust quickly if you manage to get a couple of links from the trusted web sites. Else, you are gonna have to buy them.