Part 3 - Setting Up Your Sites
Here is the tedious part that sucks. Don't take shortcuts and make crappy sites.
Now that you have different hosting accounts setup, its time to get your domains some content and get some fresh indexing. When doing this there are a couple things you need to keep in mind.
Platform - Diversity is good. Big G is diversifying and their algo gets better as it also continues to suck. As it evolves diversity is important with your network. You don't want to leave footprints. With that in mind build diversity within your network, don't just use Wordpress for everything. Build these sites on Joomla, make them in HTML, PHP and other blogging platforms. If you have Linux hosting there are a ton of platforms you can choose to do a quick install for through fantastico or softaculous. For my network I generally go with 70% WP and 30% everything else. After all Wordpress is the most popular used CMS on the internet.
Wordpress Mistakes - There are some things you might not think about when setting up your WP sites that could leave a trail back to you, and thus get you in trouble. Here are some things to keep in mind.
- Don't use the same theme across a bunch of your network. Make sure the themes are different and look professional. Don't use plain themes and put 20 full length posts on the homepage full of links. This screams network for any visual inspection you might receive or from a competitor checking your money site's backlink profile.
- Don't use the same username across your sites. This creates an author profile page and many times your posts link to that name. If you do have one username for all your WP logins, make sure that there are not any posts with that username. So that means creating a second profile with a unique name and then logging into that account and posting, or attributing all posts to that unique user.
- Don't put any attribution back to a site in your footer. Sometimes people put their own marketing site or website design company link in the footer of their whole network. Bad idea.
- Don't use the same exact categories on all your sites. A while back when Linkvana was the hot thing to use I told them how easy I was able to uncover all their sites with a search string for their categories in Google. They didn't seem to care. But they did get slapped at some point because of their carelessness.
- Don't link any of your network sites together. This is a sure way to get your whole network slapped at some point. Meaning if one sites gets hit they all get hit because of their affiliation with each other.
- Don't build back links to your sites with a public network on BHW unless you don't mind losing it, in which case you don't care and want quick rankings. Whatever floats your boat.
Content - Now its time for content. I never use spun content on my network sites. Make sure the content is original and varies in length for articles. Don't do 20 posts of 100 words each. A good way to help pass a visual inspection is to make several posts sticky on your site so your homepage has some good quality normal articles in them that link out to authority sites. Slip your own link in appropriately. Don't go balls wild with your network sites and slam them with the most obvious links. Make sure to mix in other links so it appears that linking within your posts in a natural thing and not a forced one.
Another important part where you should use discretion. If you have inbound links that are good to your network domains you need to base this on how you will build out the site, especially if these links are strong. Lets say for example that when you check the back links of your new network domain that it has a lot of links on a blogroll. This means generally they would be on the homepage of the blog or site linking out to you. If you modify the site to look nothing like the original as far as content is concerned there is a good chance they will pull that link down. Thus you would want to go to archive.org and look how the site was built and try to fashion similar to the previous version. On the other hand if for example you see you have a large amount of strong links on old pages like CNN and Edu pages that were created in 2008 then you know it is very unlikely these links will ever be pulled down because there are millions of pages on CNN.com and some of these other authority sites that have been likely forgotten. It is up to you to decide how you will use the site, but you can always keep the content similar to the old site that was on the domain before you got it and still incorporate links for your money site into it. Let me explain. Lets say that you have a domain that you are setting up content for which was previously about food but you are working the MMA niche. You could rebuild the site around food, and put an article in that is titled " Top 5 foods that MMA fighters eat". Now you can very easily slip a link in to your niche while keeping the site legit and on topic with its original use.
Another aspect in regards to value of a domain. If there were old pages on the previous site which was using the domain, try to recreate those pages if possible. If you can't then 301 redirect them to an appropriate page you have created, or to the homepage. DO NOT mass redirect all dead pages to the homepage. I have seen weird things happen doing this when a site has thousands of pages (I'm not going to go into an explanation). Instead, create some relevant pages and spread the links out between those pages evenly if possible with 301 redirects, or 404 the dead pages and let them slowly deindex on their own if they do not have any inbound links of their own.
There are a ton more things I could cover, but I think I'm done at this point. Have fun, play safe and bank hard!
