Strategy Help

I have been on these forums for sometime now and read hours and hours of information and even purchased several different types of services (xrumer blasts, seo paladin, .edu links... etc). All of this info has been incredible and truly helped me to break into a couple number one spots on individual websites (nothing special... pretty low competition). More than anything though I have just been testing the waters and playing with different methods. I have purchased scrapebox and market samurai and am still educating myself on best practices with them. Xrumer sounds amazing but too intimidating for my limited skill at this point and senukex seems to offer far too little for its price from my extensive research.

All that being said I want to dive into a hefty project. I have committed myself to a specific niche in which I have built 10 landing pages (brand new) targeting local traffic for the niche and 2 (also new) targeting national traffic for the niche. All the pages I have designed and optimized on WP and look great. I am currently have content written from a outsourcer from fiverr. I need some advice in regards to the best way to link all 12 sites together, with the local sites boosting my national sites. Eventually I intend to build out a total of 250 local sites and therefore i need to develop a good strategy implemented early on to be able to copy and paste with future sites. So, being that there seem to be some really fantastic minds on this forum.... what are the best practices of seo to use here?.... software?.... services? And what is the best link building strategy for my situation? Footer links? Content Links? Picture Links? I'm not a beginner but I definitely still have a lot of learning to do. Any advice or comments would be greatly appreciated.

My first question would be, why take on such a massive project to begin with? Why not do the local sites one by one and simply link out to the national site, which then will grow gradually as you add more? I know you think starting out with 12 sites and eventually going to 250 is small in comparison, but I still think you should focus on one site at a time.

Good question... the reason I started strong with so many sites was because the competition at a local level was so low. I am not worried about ranking them as 5 of them have already hit 1st page without any real content. I have optimized them to the t and have set up everything with managewp which makes it relatively effortless to manage them all. However as I step into larger traffic areas especially at a national level i intend to do exactly what you are referring to. The key for me is all about relevance. It seems to me there is no greater more organic way to display links to the big G than to have my easy optimized local sites boost my national site in the same way a franchise is linked to a national chain. Please correct me if my thought is wrong on this matter. My real question though is what is the best way to build out these links... ie linkwheel? pyramid? I mean what would work best for this structure.

I would say do what a franchise chain would do naturally, since you mentioned franchise. I.e. link from all the local sites to the main national site, then from the national site to each local site as you add it. Sure it would be reciprocal linking, but it would also be the most natural and relevant thing to do. Perhaps you could also interlink local sites in adjacent areas, but that's about as far as I'd go. No full-fledged link wheels.

Thanks damage that was along the lines of what i was thinking but it is always good to have it affirmed by someone else. In regards to the links... what type of link would work best? I have read in many sources that footer links get devalued and that content links are generally the way to go. What about title links, image links or menu links. Any ideas?

sneakparty said:

Thanks damage that was along the lines of what i was thinking but it is always good to have it affirmed by someone else. In regards to the links... what type of link would work best? I have read in many sources that footer links get devalued and that content links are generally the way to go. What about title links, image links or menu links. Any ideas?

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Personally I would go for menu links, as that would make most sense from a surfer's point of view.

That's true. I think then I will menu link to my big sites and deep content link to smaller sites. It seems that would be the most natural. What about outside link building. Should I boost just the smaller sites?

The main site would be boosted naturally by all the small sites linking to it. But I don't see it hurting to boost the main site as well, although it would be a lot tougher to do so. Thus I believe it would be better to focus your efforts on the local sites, one at a time or several at a time, depending on difficulty and resources you have at your disposal.

Here's an idea i had bouncing around but i was afraid to implement it because of all the effects panda has had on auto content blogs. I would never normally look at autoblogs as a real content or link source for anything but i did consider setting up my smaller sites up with something like iautoblog. This would not be for a source of page content, as i would already have that but it would be a block that could receive new relative content daily and autolink that content to the other sites on a rotating basis so as to evenly distribute links. In the same way that google news feeds work but with the exception that i would have entire articles posted with content aimed at their outbound link. I am not sure though this would provide much link juice but I would also not be abusing it. It would be like one post daily with spun relative articles. My only fear is that this has such a great chance of diminishing other efforts if google does not like this. Any thoughts or experience with this type of thing?

Basically what that would do is shift some of the link juice, the sites pass on to the main site, to some of the smaller sites. Since the smaller sites would be easier to rank regardless, I don't see the point. Let the link juice go to the main site, it's the tougher one to rank and it needs all the love it can get.