Are satellite sites too risky?Satellite websites are a tricky area. On the one hand, they can provide valuable link power to your central site. On the other hand, they can look very much like a link farm to the search engines if you’re not careful. If you’re going to invest time and money in creating one or a number of sites around your main website, you need to be sure you’re doing it for the right motives.
What are satellite sites?
Satellite sites are sites that you own and that are loosely connected to your main site. Most frequently, they’re used to set out the different aspects of a business. Many businesses set up regional sites using a country’s domain ending to set the sites apart, for example ‘advice.co.uk’ might set up ‘advice.com’ and ‘advice.com.au’. This allows them to access type-in traffic for that reason and gives them a separate separate search engine optimization platform for regional keywords.
Sometimes, business owners use satellite sites as hubs around their main site to lend support. For example, an online retail store might separate out its various strands of products onto satellite sites, linking back to the main sites for further search and purchasing.
Internet marketing motives for satellite sites
Satellite sites can be a great internet marketing move, particularly if your business has a number of aspects. Instead of trying to lump everything into the same category, you separate your products and services while keeping awareness going through interlinking. This makes things less confusing for your site users, and provides a broader scope for your internet marketing campaign.
Setting up a number of satellite sites takes work and it takes time for the search engine optimization of those sites to kick in. Your site’s users are likely to access your satellites at first through your main site, so it’s important to keep up your search engine optimization until the smaller sites are ranking by themselves.
SEO motives for satellite sites
Many businesses put up satellite sites for their search engine optimisation to allow them to target their competitive keywords more effectively. There’s no doubt that you get some SEO advantages from operating satellite sites, but perhaps not the sort of direct-link impact you would expect from regular inbound links.
If your sites have been set up solely from search engine optimisation motives, that’s when you can get into trouble. Using satellites to lure people onto a site is an old spammer’s trick of which the search engines are aware.
The search engines are also aware that some site owners see satellite sites as an easy source of links, and therefore devalue links from sites that operate from the same IP address. This and other link farm detection code in the algorithm can lower the value of satellite sites and even get your sites penalised.
Quality is central to successful satellites
As with everything else SEO, satellite sites need to be set up with users in mind. Fill them with quality content and make them worthwhile. Concentrating on users is your best defence in the face of a penalty.
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