Create a directory to get link juice?

SearchingLost · 09-08-2011, 12:53 PM

The company I work for wants to take a URL and turn it into a directory. The example I am going to use is trophies. We want to call the website www.BestTrophyComapnies.com (or something along that line). In this directory we are going to list our competitors (along with our site). We are going to give each of our competitors a cool badge to put on their homepage that says something along the lines of "BEST Trophy Company!" and it will have a cool avatar with it. Essentially we want as many of our competitors as possible to link to the directory and then we are going to have our actual site take up the ad space (which is fake because we own the directory) on the directory. A guy on our team came up with this philosophy and thinks that we will steal a lot of link juice from our competitors and this link juice will be very valuable.

Thoughts?

Nero Arcnumé · 09-08-2011, 01:58 PM

Sounds like a cool & sneaky idea in theory. But I think you're going to have to put in quite some effort before your competitors will actually link to your site with the badge.

Your directory needs to become an authority site before businesses start to link to it, I think. And I suppose they'll also want to see some post or page on the site that basically says your directory is awarding their site with "BEST trophy company". But since you want to give many companies these kind of awards, they'll see all the other awards if you're going to create a post for them. So it won't look very legit if you give 500 companies the "Best trophy company" award. To battle this, I guess you could divide the awards into many sub-categories, like "Best golden plaque", "Most beautiful embossed font", etc.

I'm probably missing things, but to me it sounds doable in theory but difficult, if not unfeasible, to generate back the cost + profits with this project over time.

09-08-2011, 12:53 PM	#1
SearchingLost Active Warrior Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Jacksonville, FL Posts: 29 Thanks: 2 Thanked 3 Times in 3 Posts	Create a directory to get link juice? The company I work for wants to take a URL and turn it into a directory. The example I am going to use is trophies. We want to call the website www.BestTrophyComapnies.com (or something along that line). In this directory we are going to list our competitors (along with our site). We are going to give each of our competitors a cool badge to put on their homepage that says something along the lines of "BEST Trophy Company!" and it will have a cool avatar with it. Essentially we want as many of our competitors as possible to link to the directory and then we are going to have our actual site take up the ad space (which is fake because we own the directory) on the directory. A guy on our team came up with this philosophy and thinks that we will steal a lot of link juice from our competitors and this link juice will be very valuable. Thoughts?

09-08-2011, 01:58 PM	#2
Nero Arcnumé Active Warrior Join Date: Jul 2011 Posts: 51 Thanks: 3 Thanked 4 Times in 3 Posts	Re: Create a directory to get link juice? Sounds like a cool & sneaky idea in theory. But I think you're going to have to put in quite some effort before your competitors will actually link to your site with the badge. Your directory needs to become an authority site before businesses start to link to it, I think. And I suppose they'll also want to see some post or page on the site that basically says your directory is awarding their site with "BEST trophy company". But since you want to give many companies these kind of awards, they'll see all the other awards if you're going to create a post for them. So it won't look very legit if you give 500 companies the "Best trophy company" award. To battle this, I guess you could divide the awards into many sub-categories, like "Best golden plaque", "Most beautiful embossed font", etc. I'm probably missing things, but to me it sounds doable in theory but difficult, if not unfeasible, to generate back the cost + profits with this project over time.
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