A Ticking Bomb SEO Strategy Making a Comeback?

Recently I just received news that another new product is hitting the SEO shelves that focuses on the mini-net strategy. While very tempting to use due to the near-instant boost in traffic rankings, I completely recommend against using this strategy. It’s very, very tricky and just one wrong move can blow all of your websites out of the water.

The mini-net strategy works like this:

• You have a set of websites that all center around the same basic theme;
• Because you own the sites you can link to all of them as you wish (makes sense right?);
• Since all of your sites center around a common theme, you link to them as such:
  • Site A is about German Shepard dogs;
  • Site B is about training German Shepard dogs;
  • Site C is a forum about German Shepard dogs;
  • Site D is a store where you can purchase dog products;

In the mini-net strategy you would link each site to one another.  Because they are technically all related, you figure that there’s no harm in doing so.  However, there are some major pitfalls using this strategy.

1. The search engines will know that you own each of these websites if you aren’t using a domains by proxy which hides your name from anyone wishing to access the whois registry. And since they know who you are, they’ll be able to know that you own each of the websites above and that you are linking to each one of them.
2. The downside to this is that search engines consider those who do use domains by proxy as having something to hide.  Now, while there are legitimate reasons to hide your information (from SPAM-bots) for instance, search engines still view this with some suspicion.
3. Ideally each website you own should be on a different Class C IP address.  I know we’re getting into some pretty technical details but just know that one of the ways people use to hide the fact that they’re using a mini-net strategy is to have each of these sites set up on a different IP addresses so that they aren’t detected as using a mini-net strategy.

This strategy is very, very tricky to implement and done wrong, can eliminate all of your sites from a search engines index. And I’ve only shown you the tip of the iceberg.

So the bottom line is that if someone comes to you and says that they can get your site listed quickly, get it to the top of the search engines quickly and that it’s “simple” to implement, don’t believe it for a second.  You could be in for a very nasty surprise a few weeks down the road when the search engines discover this technique.