SEO for Subdomains?

[amarketing]

Hi everyone.

I'm really interested in setting up a network of niche sites for Adsense or Amazon (I haven't decided yet). From what I've read, many of the marketers who do this work mainly in volume, that isl, they own (or at lest start out with) a lot of sites.

This probably runs into a large cost to initially acquire the domains and then pay for the renewal fees each year.

One think I considered was creating a domain like www.allinfo.com and then just creating subdomains off of it: i.e. www.allinfo.greenwidgits.com, getridofsquirrels.com, etc.

I know that many niche marketers lend a fair amount of importance to having an exact match domain. However, I have also heard that a subdomain is regarded as a separate website for seo purposes.

So, how hard do you think it will be to rank niche sites that are subdomains of some general domain?

Thanks for any advice.

[dburk]

Hi amarketing,

Your thinking is sound, however your technical understanding of subdomains seems a little off. For example, in the URL www.allinfo.com, the subdomain is the "www." part of it. In your example, "www.allinfo.greenwidgits.com" the primary domain is "greenwidgits.com" the "allinfo" is a subdomain of greenwidgits.com, so you would need to purchase that domain separately from the allinfo.com domain.

Instead you could create a "greenwidgits" subdomain of your primary allinfo.com domain (i.e. greenwidgets.allinfo.com", getridofsquirrels.allinfo.com, etc).

To answer your question:

So, how hard do you think it will be to rank niche sites that are subdomains of some general domain?

Search engines do not "rank" sites, they rank individual URLs. So it would be just as easy to rank a page on a subdomain as it is for any other page. Your idea is a sound strategy that will save you substantial dollars. How well you do will depend on the quality of your content and how well you promote it. The fact that it is a subdomain will have little or no impact at all. For that matter you can do nearly as well using directories, all on the same domain (i.e. www.allinfo.com/greenwidgits/, www.allinfo.com/getridofsquirrels/, etc.)

Don't get caught up in the misconception that search engines rank sites, that will cause you to do a lot of stupid things that wastes time and money.

[zabalex]

As dburk said, please note the each individual Page represented by the unique URL gets ranking in SERP. So it really do not matter you configure a sub domain or build a separate site to start with.

All you need is to promote them in the same manner as a new site is being promoted. If you have no visitors you will get no clicks on your adsense ads, same is the case with Amazon affiliate program, no visitor no sell, less visitor less sell. Just do the promotion in the same manner as you do with your websites. The choice is your to go with a Niche site or to start with a sub domain.

[rooze]

Websites have authority, pages have page rank. So the issue is, if I create a sub-domain does it carry the 'authority' of the main domain, and it appears that the answer is no.
An alternative is to use sub-directories. A sub-dir carries the authority of the main domain whereas sub-domains do not.
To think that a page is ranked without any influence from the site as a whole is nonsense. How do you think sites like Amazon and Wiki have a single page of information that outranks a website with 100's of pages dedicated to the same subject? It's because of site authority, and it is extremely important for ranking individual pages.
If you choose the wrong option for managing your niches you're wasting an opportunity for developing a site with good authority hence good ranking ability.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by rooze

Websites have authority, pages have page rank. So the issue is, if I create a sub-domain does it carry the 'authority' of the main domain, and it appears that the answer is no.
An alternative is to use sub-directories. A sub-dir carries the authority of the main domain whereas sub-domains do not.
To think that a page is ranked without any influence from the site as a whole is nonsense. How do you think sites like Amazon and Wiki have a single page of information that outranks a website with 100's of pages dedicated to the same subject? It's because of site authority, and it is extremely important for ranking individual pages.
If you choose the wrong option for managing your niches you're wasting an opportunity for developing a site with good authority hence good ranking ability.

Hi rooze,

I'm am sorry, but I must disagree. That is a common misconception about the notion of site authority. In fact, the biggest proponent, back in the day when it was being heavily touted as a possible ranking factor, was Rand Fishkin.

Even Rand has backed off the notion of "site" authority after he tried to devise a method of measuring it. What he found is that if it exists has so little effect that you should pay no attention to it, that it is "page" authority that really matters.

Any webpage, placed on any domain will have the exact same authority if it has the exact same backlinks. I could register a brand new domain and create a new page that has links from the same pages that the Amazon, or Wiki pages have and it will have the exact same authority as it would if it was place on those domains.

The fact is that search engines, like Google, do not look at site level, nor domain level factors. All ranking factors are based on what is on your page, what is on the pages that you link to, and the factors of pages that link to yours. Everything is page level, nothing is site level.

[amarketing]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi amarketing,

Your thinking is sound, however your technical understanding of subdomains seems a little off. For example, in the URL www.allinfo.com, the subdomain is the "www." part of it. In your example, "www.allinfo.greenwidgits.com" the primary domain is "greenwidgits.com" the "allinfo" is a subdomain of greenwidgits.com, so you would need to purchase that domain separately from the allinfo.com domain.

Instead you could create a "greenwidgits" subdomain of your primary allinfo.com domain (i.e. greenwidgets.allinfo.com", getridofsquirrels.allinfo.com, etc).

To answer your question:


Search engines do not "rank" sites, they rank individual URLs. So it would be just as easy to rank a page on a subdomain as it is for any other page. Your idea is a sound strategy that will save you substantial dollars. How well you do will depend on the quality of your content and how well you promote it. The fact that it is a subdomain will have little or no impact at all. For that matter you can do nearly as well using directories, all on the same domain (i.e. www.allinfo.com/greenwidgits/, www.allinfo.com/getridofsquirrels/, etc.)

Don't get caught up in the misconception that search engines rank sites, that will cause you to do a lot of stupid things that wastes time and money.

Thank you so much for your informative reply!

I mis-typed on the URLs. You are exactly right in your description of of subdomains. cats.allinfo.com, bugles.allinfo.com, pancakes.allinfo.com, etc. That's what I was talking about.

From what you say, I could just buy one premium domain name and be able to create dozens of niche sites from it while only paying to host one domain name and only paying one renewal fee.

I want to ask you, would it affect SEO for each subdomain if they were all on unrelated niches? From your post, it sounds like it shouldn't. After all, Wikipedia is every niche under the sun and that's not even sub-domains.

Thanks again for your great advice.

[bjd461]

Hi
I was looking into this same subject recently for myself.
No exact figures or anything like that, but here goes:
Group A are the people saying things like 'subdomains - beware, dont go there'.
Group B are the people saying subdomains are just fine, work them like any site.

Group A is much bigger than B, but by and large, they say it, but do not or can not back that up.
Group B is smaller, but most of those people seem to speak from experience, as in they have already done it, and got on fine.

So my overall thoughts are that the nay-sayers are mostly saying nay from what they have been taught, not from what they have learned for themselves.

The biggest drawbacks are that you can not sell off any sites, and they will all be hosted together.

I say Go for it. I got a generic site too, and in 6 months or so i'll know more lol.

Brian

[OO]

Did anyone hear what Google said about subdomains lately:

Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by amarketing

Thank you so much for your informative reply!

I mis-typed on the URLs. You are exactly right in your description of of subdomains. cats.allinfo.com, bugles.allinfo.com, pancakes.allinfo.com, etc. That's what I was talking about.

From what you say, I could just buy one premium domain name and be able to create dozens of niche sites from it while only paying to host one domain name and only paying one renewal fee.

I want to ask you, would it affect SEO for each subdomain if they were all on unrelated niches? From your post, it sounds like it shouldn't. After all, Wikipedia is every niche under the sun and that's not even sub-domains.

Thanks again for your great advice.

Hi amarketing,

Again your thinking is spot on.

Search engines rank individual pages, not sites. It doesn't matter what your site, or subdomain topic is, it only matters what your individual page topic is and how well optimized it is for that topical keyword.

Just as you pointed out with Wikipedia, the "site" topic has little or nothing to do with the topic of most pages on that site. However, if you look at the individual pages you will see that they are each well optimized for a particular keyword topic.

The creators of Wikipedia truly understand how search engines work. Anytime you are uncertain about advice given by self-declared "experts", look at Wikipedia and ask if it holds true to that excellent example. The network of sites operated by that group serves as great testament to just how wrong much of that contrary advice can be.

[amarketing]

Thanks for confirming my thoughts.

Let me take this "page" ranking fact a little further. What about sole "pages"? That is, do you think it would be possible to have a Wikipedia-like site on a smaller scale and still have no issues with ranking? Say, a site with a structure like allinfo.com/ferrets, allinfo.com/windmills, allinfo.com/seo, etc.

Instead of creating a separate subdomain for each topic, would I be able to create a separate directory or page and still not have trouble ranking for the subjects...even with a smaller site (not something as massive as Wikipedia)? If I'm gathering correctly from what you say, I should still be able to rank even if I'm targeting keywords with pages/directories instead of subdomains.

Also, do you think that in general Google tends to frown upon sites that have pages and pages of unrelated content? I ask this because I've heard others say that they have had their homepage rank better when they added more on-topic content to the overall site. What do you think of this? Thanks for the all of your help!

[rooze]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi rooze,

I'm am sorry, but I must disagree. That is a common misconception about the notion of site authority. In fact, the biggest proponent, back in the day when it was being heavily touted as a possible ranking factor, was Rand Fishkin.

Even Rand has backed off the notion of "site" authority after he tried to devise a method of measuring it. What he found is that if it exists has so little effect that you should pay no attention to it, that it is "page" authority that really matters.

Any webpage, placed on any domain will have the exact same authority if it has the exact same backlinks. I could register a brand new domain and create a new page that has links from the same pages that the Amazon, or Wiki pages have and it will have the exact same authority as it would if it was place on those domains.

The fact is that search engines, like Google, do not look at site level, nor domain level factors. All ranking factors are based on what is on your page, what is on the pages that you link to, and the factors of pages that link to yours. Everything is page level, nothing is site level.

Hey Don,

I haven't heard many folks argue against the existence of site authority. If you look at websites like Wiki, Amazon etc, they have 100's of 1000's of isolated pages that are not part of any theme or internal linking system, nor are many of them excessively linked too externally in some cases. Yet those pages continually appear as high ranking pages in the SERP's, outranking other sites who might be entirely dedicated to a specific subject. It's hard to imagine where else that kind of 'power' can come from, other than 'site authority'. Another example of SA is eZine Articles. Many people write an article and place it on their own sites first. They integrate the article into their own on-site navigation so it's heavily linked to, then start to build back-links from external sources. Then at some point they'll post the article to one of the bigger Article Directories like eZine, and the article will eventually out-rank the same article on their own site.
I think there's plenty of evidence that it exists and that it's a major, and growing factor in how Google ranks websites. Of course it cannot easily be measured, which might be why some people dismiss its existence altogether. There's the old scientific theory that if it cannot be measured it does not exist. I don't think that applies to anything that comes out of the Google algorithm

Good luck with your ventures and have a great 2012

Rooze

[arnold55]

Several years I asked this same question in the bludavoda forum. The answers I received were it did not matter. "Pages are ranked not sites". So since this came from the most sr person I think a 4 star general I took it as gospel.

I created a large network of sub.domains.com. My sub.domains did not do well I have still have a few but I use them for linking purposes.

I have noticed that there are sub.domains on the first page and some even ranked #1 on google for search terms. The ones that I have noticed were all "subdomain.blogspot.com's". (type in "huggies diapers") you will see this as number 3
Printable Coupons: Huggies Coupons
also this site has a number of number one's

happy new year!
arnold55
mike reynolds

[dburk]

Originally Posted by amarketing

Thanks for confirming my thoughts.

Let me take this "page" ranking fact a little further. What about sole "pages"? That is, do you think it would be possible to have a Wikipedia-like site on a smaller scale and still have no issues with ranking? Say, a site with a structure like allinfo.com/ferrets, allinfo.com/windmills, allinfo.com/seo, etc.

Instead of creating a separate subdomain for each topic, would I be able to create a separate directory or page and still not have trouble ranking for the subjects...even with a smaller site (not something as massive as Wikipedia)? If I'm gathering correctly from what you say, I should still be able to rank even if I'm targeting keywords with pages/directories instead of subdomains.

Also, do you think that in general Google tends to frown upon sites that have pages and pages of unrelated content? I ask this because I've heard others say that they have had their homepage rank better when they added more on-topic content to the overall site. What do you think of this? Thanks for the all of your help!

Hi amarketing,

I say yes, go for it, there is no reason you cannot have great results with a site that covers many topics. Just bear in mind that each page will need it's own SEO campaign to rank for the targeted keywords.

Google certainly does not frown on websites that cover many topics, as long as your website is structured in a way that makes sense to users.

Again, by focusing your promotional efforts on a single keyword for a single page of your website you will see faster results, generally, than you might see by spreading your efforts over many pages and many keywords. This has nothing to do with how Google ranks pages, it is simply a result of concentrating your efforts onto a single page. That page doesn't need to be the homepage, it could be any page on your website targeting any keyword.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by rooze

Hey Don,

I haven't heard many folks argue against the existence of site authority. If you look at websites like Wiki, Amazon etc, they have 100's of 1000's of isolated pages that are not part of any theme or internal linking system, nor are many of them excessively linked too externally in some cases. Yet those pages continually appear as high ranking pages in the SERP's, outranking other sites who might be entirely dedicated to a specific subject. It's hard to imagine where else that kind of 'power' can come from, other than 'site authority'.

Hi rooze,

It's called "page authority", check out Fishkin's research, he like many folks assumed site authority, however when he attempted to measure it he could not find any influence beyond individual "page" authority. He still includes the site authority metric in his tools ,but it now simply represents the individual "page" authority of the homepage.

There simply isn't any measurable "site" level authority that any researcher has been able to measure, that I have ever heard of. It's just a theory that never reconciled with empirical data.

In your supposed example of Wikipedia, I think you are mistaken. I have looked and never found a single example on that site that matches your assertion. Could you please point to an actual URL. I am pretty sure ther isn't one in existence that matches your claim.

Originally Posted by rooze

Another example of SA is eZine Articles. Many people write an article and place it on their own sites first. They integrate the article into their own on-site navigation so it's heavily linked to, then start to build back-links from external sources. Then at some point they'll post the article to one of the bigger Article Directories like eZine, and the article will eventually out-rank the same article on their own site.

Again, you are pointing to "page" level factors. Ezinarticles.com uses internal link structure to boost the page rank of most pages on their website, including those articles. Those pages would not likely outrank your own page, if it wasn't for those internal links to those pages. Again "page" level factors seem to account for what you are describing.

Originally Posted by rooze

I think there's plenty of evidence that it exists and that it's a major, and growing factor in how Google ranks websites. Of course it cannot easily be measured, which might be why some people dismiss its existence altogether. There's the old scientific theory that if it cannot be measured it does not exist. I don't think that applies to anything that comes out of the Google algorithm

If you can find some evidence that shows "site" level authority that is separately measurable from individual page level authority, I'd love to see it. I have asked for examples on this forum, as well as others, many times and to date no one has been able to produce it. To simply call "page authority", "site authority", is a little deceptive.

While I do admire the many wonderful accomplishments of Google, I'm pretty sure they have not yet found a way to suspend the laws scientific principles.

[rooze]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi rooze,

It's called "page authority", check out Fishkin's research, he like many folks assumed site authority, however when he attempted to measure it he could not find any influence beyond individual "page" authority. He still includes the site authority metric in his tools ,but it now simply represents the individual "page" authority of the homepage.

There simply isn't any measurable "site" level authority that any researcher has been able to measure, that I have ever heard of. It's just a theory that never reconciled with empirical data. I agree that it isn't measurable, nor is Page Rank anymore since Google changed its algo last year. PR used to be calculable based on the number of incoming links and the PR of the pages hosting the links along with the number of OBL on the host page, but that seems to have gone out of the window. For example, I have a PR5 page on a health niche site that only has a handful of backlinks and none from a page higher than PR2.

In your supposed example of Wikipedia, I think you are mistaken. I have looked and never found a single example on that site that matches your assertion. Could you please point to an actual URL. I am pretty sure ther isn't one in existence that matches your claim. It's harder to do that now, with the closure of Yahoo SE. You can't easily see the backlinks pointing to specific pages so you can't easily exclude backlinks as the factor for a pages high SERP. I used to track new subjects landing on WIKI and actually contributed to a couple of new topics. They'd invariably appear in the first part of the SERP's within just a few days. The pages were too new to have a high number of backlinks and are only accessible internally via the standard DB search. I do some work for a company in a health niche still, so one or two examples of pages which rank high are for searches on topics like 'beeswax' and 'royal jelly'. If you look at some of the sites displaced by wiki they're highly themed with aged domains and a good backlink profile, but wiki pages edge them out. Again, it's harder to investigate the backlink impact nowadays, until a good replacement for YSE comes along.


Again, you are pointing to "page" level factors. Ezinarticles.com uses internal link structure to boost the page rank of most pages on their website, including those articles. Those pages would not likely outrank your own page, if it wasn't for those internal links to those pages. Again "page" level factors seem to account for what you are describing.

I don't think eZine does that "uses internal link structure to boost the page rank of most pages" Articles are fetched from the database by search and not really incorporated into site nav, unless they're featured. In the vast majority of cases, articles are on PR0 pages, they don't inherit PR internally since they're not linked to internally. Some people blast links to their articles, at which point they pick up a higher PR. But there are countless PR0 article pages appearing in SERP's which displace identical articles on web pages with more backlinks sitting on themed websites etc. How can this be if SA is not a factor?

If you can find some evidence that shows "site" level authority that is separately measurable from individual page level authority, I'd love to see it. I have asked for examples on this forum, as well as others, many times and to date no one has been able to produce it. To simply call "page authority", "site authority", is a little deceptive.
I think the wiki examples and also catalog/product pages which are the results of dynamically fetched data and not included in any static (or dynamic) site navigation are examples of pages which indicate the presence of SA. These are prominent on wiki, amazon and all the big shopping/database sites, and on certain article directories like eZines. You can also see the point illustrated in a different way if you think about what happened to EZA in the Panda update, it's entire database of articles dropped dramatically in the SERP's. If SA were not a factor, the individual article pages would not have dropped en masse in the way that they did. After all, their incoming links did not change nor any other external factors. If page authority were the only factor, there couldn't have been such a dramatic change in the vast majority of SERP's.

While I do admire the many wonderful accomplishments of Google, I'm pretty sure they have not yet found a way to suspend the laws scientific principles.
I don't claim that they've aver done that, just that they have a way of determining SERP's based on a highly protected algo. Obviously when so much rests on the outcome of a piece of code, they're not going to divulge to the world how that code works. With something as complex as SA, it's practically impossible to reverse-engineer the code - working back from the SERP's to determine exactly how a website got there. Thus unlocking the code and parameters used is impossible I suspect. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I've enjoyed the discussion and respect/appreciate your opinion, but I do still remain committed to the concept of Page Rank and Site Authority working in tandem to determine SERP's. My theory at the moment is that the old PR system is being heavily overhauled to incorporate techniques to detect spammy backlink building. The SA system is also being continually updated too, I'm sure.

Cheers and have a great 2012!

Rooze

EDIT: PS, sorry, I kinda put the above together very quickly, there may be some typo's or arguments which I have articulated very well!

[dburk]

Originally Posted by rooze

I've enjoyed the discussion and respect/appreciate your opinion, but I do still remain committed to the concept of Page Rank and Site Authority working in tandem to determine SERP's. My theory at the moment is that the old PR system is being heavily overhauled to incorporate techniques to detect spammy backlink building. The SA system is also being continually updated too, I'm sure.

Cheers and have a great 2012!

Rooze

EDIT: PS, sorry, I kinda put the above together very quickly, there may be some typo's or arguments which I have articulated very well!

Hi rooze,

I think you may need to take a closer look at some of those examples you are citing. For example, Wikipedia and Ezinearticles both do extensive internal linking, your claim to the contrary doesn't seem to bear out. I double checked just now to make sure they haven't changed, and sure enough, I found extensive internal linking.

Again, I will assert that everything you are applying toward "site authority" can easily be measured as part of the PageRank algorithm. Where you seem to be going amiss, and this is just a guess on my part, is you are not taking into account the link juice that flows through internal links. That is not "site" authority since it only flows to individual pages based on the inbound links to those specific pages.

While it is true that PageRank flow is governed by Trust factors, this isn't new. What has changed this past year is the new quality factors introduced as part of the Panda series of updates. Google has been devaluing backlinks from untrustworthy pages for some time, they just automated the process a bit more as part of the Panda update and it is devaluing more at a faster pace than before.

An important thing to note is that we cannot always see all of our backlinks that have been found by Google, and we cannot see what the current PR is for those backlinks that we are aware of since that data is always reported to the toolbar after the fact and infrequently. If you continue to gather data over a longer period of time you will see that PageRank calculations haven't changed that much, it is the detection and devaluation of web spam that has improved.

[amarketing]

Dburk,

Thank you once again for your reply. It looks like from what you are saying, as long as the page is optimized for a keyword and back-linked, it really won't make much of a difference as to the theme of the content of the other pages of the site (sorry if that sounds confusing). Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge on the matter.

Could you elaborate more on what you said here?:

as long as your website is structured in a way that makes sense to users.

How would you recommend a site be structured if the pages would all be focusing on different subjects?

Also, I've read where niche marketers have noted that the rankings of their homepages improved when they added more pages of content to their sites. From what you say, these pages shouldn't affect the ranking of the home page, yet they seem to. Do you think this may be due to interlinking? Also, if their site is a blog, perhaps the extra "new posts" on the home page help that page?

Thanks for your reply.

[webworm]

Creating sub -domais and building backlinks is one of the effective way on SEO.But many are unaware towards this technique.Sub-domain are very useful for the site's ranking.

[amarketing]

Also, something I heard recently is that the advantage to using sub-domains instead of pages on your site is that you can use the same SEO strategy on each sub-domain and send links from the sames sites and have them all rank well. However, I read that if you are using pages on the same site, Google will give less value to links from the same sites to multiple pages on your site.

What I'm trying to say is I heard you have to get links from different sources to each page on your site. However, with sub-domains, you don't have to vary the sources of each link.

Is this true?

Thanks a lot.

[dburk]

Hi amarketing,


No, not exactly.

The main advantage to using sub domains is that you are always including your keyword in the URL, if that sub domain happens to be your targeted keyword. It has the added advantage of prominence by being the first and foremost portion of the URL. This is similar to the impact of an EMD.

However, if you take care to use file names and directory names that include the same keyword, you will still have your targeted keyword within the URL and the only difference is in the prominence factor. Either way will still be highly effective when done properly.

When it comes to link juice it doesn't seem to matter which domain your links are on, just the diversity of your link sources. A link from a page on the same website has the same link juice that a link from a page on another website, assuming the each of those pages has the exact same backlinks. It is not the fact that the link comes from another domain, nor another IP, it is the fact that the link comes from a page with a totally different set of backlinks. That is what is meant by diversity in backlinks.

Google uses the PageRank algorithm to calculate link juice, it is a mathematical formula and isn't effected by domain names, or IP addreses, just individual links. Separating your own pages onto different domains, or IPs, doesn't, in and of itself, change the diversity of backlinks. If you build the same backlinks to the same set of pages they have the same link juice regardless of which domain or IP address they are located on.

[Domainate]

One of the pros of using subdomains vs. separate domains as others have mentioned is you can always get a partial keyword match in the domain part of the URL. Additionally, if you focus your efforts on only one domain, you can get a better one which could take you further than lesser domains.

That said, exact match domains slay the search engines and the extra work/money involved with buying them for each niche you target comes back in easier page 1 rankings.

[Tricerra]

I am still on the fence about this issue. I have one site that has more than 60 subdomains on it but all of the subdomains are related to the main domain and it is for a local group of companies that I am doing local marketing on these subdomains for these clients.

Each time I start a new site I look at argument of subdomain, domain, same hosting server, different hosting server and still seem to always come back to hosting on separate domains with separate hosting plans for each domain. I am not sure if this is the best route or not but I will continue to watch these discussions knowing that my approach is working and while probably not as cheap as other options right now the costs are covered and I am making money. So can say with "site authority" and "page rank" that if you can get it on and keep it on and make money then you are doing what is right for you, right now.

[amarketing]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi amarketing,


No, not exactly.

The main advantage to using sub domains is that you are always including your keyword in the URL, if that sub domain happens to be your targeted keyword. It has the added advantage of prominence by being the first and foremost portion of the URL. This is similar to the impact of an EMD.

However, if you take care to use file names and directory names that include the same keyword, you will still have your targeted keyword within the URL and the only difference is in the prominence factor. Either way will still be highly effective when done properly.

When it comes to link juice it doesn't seem to matter which domain your links are on, just the diversity of your link sources. A link from a page on the same website has the same link juice that a link from a page on another website, assuming the each of those pages has the exact same backlinks. It is not the fact that the link comes from another domain, nor another IP, it is the fact that the link comes from a page with a totally different set of backlinks. That is what is meant by diversity in backlinks.

Google uses the PageRank algorithm to calculate link juice, it is a mathematical formula and isn't effected by domain names, or IP addreses, just individual links. Separating your own pages onto different domains, or IPs, doesn't, in and of itself, change the diversity of backlinks.

Thanks a lot for this reply and for lending some insights.

For example, say I make 3 blog comments on the same page of someone's site (not that blog spamming is a good thing), one right above the other, and each comment links back to a different page on my site. You are saying that each page on my site will receive the same amount of "link juice," regardless of having the backlinks linking back to the same domain, right?

Also, if you could clarify the last statement you made:

If you build the same backlinks to the same set of pages they have the same link juice regardless of which domain or IP address they are located on.

Which are you referring to by "they"? The pages or the backlinks?

Sorry if I'm being a pain, but I just want to confirm that we are on the same page.

Thanks a lot for your help!

[dburk]

Originally Posted by amarketing

Thanks a lot for this reply and for lending some insights.

For example, say I make 3 blog comments on the same page of someone's site (not that blog spamming is a good thing), one right above the other, and each comment links back to a different page on my site. You are saying that each page on my site will receive the same amount of "link juice," regardless of having the backlinks linking back to the same domain, right?

Hi amarketing,

Yes, that is correct. The link juice is divided equally among each distinct outbound URL. Having multiple OBLs to the same URL is treated as a single link, but unique landing page URLs, regardless of which domain, share equally in the link juice that is passed.

Originally Posted by amarketing

Also, if you could clarify the last statement you made:

Which are you referring to by "they"? The pages or the backlinks?

Sorry if I'm being a pain, but I just want to confirm that we are on the same page.

Thanks a lot for your help!

By the word "they" I mean both, the pages and the backlinks. If 2 different pages share the exact same set of backlinks then they both will have the exact same link juice flowing to them. The backlinks are identical so there is no difference in the link juice from those backlinks.

Think about it, if the backlinks are exactly the same, how could the link juice possibly be different?

[amarketing]

Wow, thanks a lot, DBurke, you've really cleared everything up. I see your point about the back-links all being "the same" so therefore they should pass the same link-juice to the sites they link to.

I was thinking that perhaps Google would be able to tell that there are multiple links on a single page to the same domain and would thus devalue some of them. However, from what you posted, that would be giving Google a little more credit that what is due.

What you posted makes more sense. Also, you seem to speak from experience, so you've probably done the tests and seen the results for yourself.

Thanks for sharing your experience in all of these posts!