A while back I talked about how Dealer.com sites have a huge ring of websites to generate backlinks to their dealers sites. Well I’ve been doing my own linkbuilding and figured I’d share some things with you.
I’ve long been a fan of using keywords in your domain name for SEO purposes. For instance, if you want to rank for “Star Wars leveling guide“, your URL should have those words in it. Or in the case of an auto dealer, how about if you want to rank for “Dayton Dodge dealer”?
Well, the answer may be to simply set up a domain with those keywords and build a simple site there. I did just this with the domain “daytondodgedealer.com”. I set up a basic WordPress site with a one-click install and went to town. A couple of posts later and I had relevant SEO content including a link back to my main domain. Remember that the text of the link should include the keyword phrase you’re targeting – in this case “Dayton Dodge dealer“.
You could set up many of these spoke sites… all pointing back to your main site.
Will Google and Bing pick it up and rank it well right away? Well in my case Google actually did rank it pretty quickly. Within 2 weeks it was 56th for the target term! That might not sound very high, but that’s with the domain being new and having a domain authority of 1. (Update – it’s now 39th for “dayton dodge dealer” with no work being done to it.)
Bing on the other hand hasn’t ranked it so far. I’ll report back at some point when and if Bing likes the site.
So – how much does this affect the main site that this “spammy SEO content site” links to? That remains to be seen and the answer might not ever be known. I think it has very modest value at the moment, but in time and with some backlinking done to increase the authority of the sub-site, it could be a very nice backlink.
The bonus here is that once it’s set up the value of the sub-site will continue to grow. You can add content to it here and there and even add links to other sites. You could do some automated backlinking to this site or grow it organically. If it does rank really well, you may want to make sure it has a pretty landing page and perhaps less spammy-looking text.
