Turning on page into off page SEO

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beezee

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Was doing some competition analysis earlier tonight, looking at backlinks for the #1 in a relatively competitive niche.

I did a double take because a TON of the indexed links showing up were internal links, meaning the site linking to itself.

After the initial WTF wore off I looked again, and realized the indexed backlinks were coming from the non-www version of the site, making it a totally different domain as far as SEO value is concerned.

I'm vaguely familiar with the whole canonical link issue and how this can harm your SEO, but these guys have used it intentionally to great effect. I may try this out on a site or two myself and see how it works, anybody else who's done this glad to hear your experience, anybody else who tries it now definitely report back.
 
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I thought all the major SE's settled the www. vs non many years ago?
 
If I understand correctly the solution is to use rel="canonical" to determine which one your site is using, but as far as links are concerned, you can build 100s to http://site.com and it won't count for http://www.site.com or vice versa.

This guy had at least 400 links indexed in yahoo site explorer coming from the non-www version of his own site.
 
These are still just internal links. They are not from 'another' domain. Domain = site.com, it doesn't matter if you have www or non-www version linking to you.

Internal links are valuable, no doubt about that, you should have a better linking pattern internally to make the PR flow naturally.
 
Fair enough, but why then would yahoo site explorer list 400 of them? I've seen plenty of sites with 1000s of pages indexed that don't list more than one or two internal links in site explorer.

This isn't a typical index rate for internal backlinks.
 
Try checking backlinks of Wikipedia, yahoo, gizmodo, mashable, any huge blog or website. They all have more than 10k internal links each, in wikipedia's case, they have in millions.

You know you can select the option " show links : Except from this domain " and you that way you can see all the links from external sites.

And to top it all off, having both www and non-www version of a site online, gives you a huge duplicate content penalty. Which far outweighs the value of these non-www internal links. So, I would NOT recommend it at all. But, you should try it out and absolutely let us know the results of your experiment.
 
Obviously you'd need to have different content on each version- this guy has taken that into consideration because he's #1 for around 10 different fairly competitive keywords in this niche, where a duplicate content penalty should have prevented this.

I don't think the idea is to duplicate the site both www and non www, rather to have some of your content www and some non www. Is that possible? That would be the goal anyway.
 
thanks for the info about linking itself without getting penalized by google. this post made me understand something important :D
 
Before anyone goes "insane with power" over this knowledge, keep in mind "www" is a sub-domain of "domain.com" (http://www.domain.com) just like "site2.domain.com". So any information you can pickup about using sub-domains inside this forum for SEO would apply the same way.
 
Makes me wonder if links across subdomains are worth more than internal links on one domain.

Very nicely put, thanks for the insight.
 
good tip there on canonical urls, it's a must for large sites !

all i know is there put rel=canonical on your main page to tell the SE which version is the keeper
 
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