Mini sites remain a popular approach among content and SEO affiliates. For those of you who have yet to play with them, a mini site generally consists, as the name suggests, of a relatively small number of pages focused on a specific theme and with a relevant domain name, strong on-page SEO and great content. Although less fashionable than perhaps three or four years ago, mini sites remain a useful tool for affiliates wishing to promote niche merchants, products and services. This approach can be particularly useful for affiliates whose main sites are perhaps cross-category directories or shopping portals for which it can be hard to achieve search engine rankings in some of the tougher categories.

Assuming that you are trying to drive natural search traffic as opposed to simply using the site as a set of PPC landing pages, the acquisition of good inbound links is going to be essential. There is an element of “chicken and egg” with linking: webmasters want to trade links with sites that are already ranked but it is hard to get ranked without links. The type, quality and location of the first five links therefore become critical in kick-starting a linking campaign.

Techniques
Since you cannot yet offer a ranked page as a “fair exchange of value” for linking, you will need to offer some form of content instead. One popular approach utilises social media sites such as Digg, Squidoo and other blogging and article publishing platforms. Articles that are of particular interest to the selected group and contain a naturally inserted link to your mini site should certainly help in initiating the linking process. Because many of these sites are strongly ranked by the search engines and are regarded as being independent rather than overtly commercial sites, such links can over time contribute significantly to ranking. They key here is to ensure that the sites you choose do not use the dreaded “nofollow” tag with links. Many social media sites have employed this: a technique originally introduced by Google to allow the webmasters of blogs and social media sites to “tell” the search engine spiders not to follow – or at least not to confer ranking as a result of – a given link. This was in response to excessive numbers of low value posts from webmasters seeking only the link and offering relatively little in the way of intellectual property or value in return.

Spotting the use of nofollow is generally fairly easy. Simply view the source of some of the posts and pages on the site in question and search for “nofollow”. If this is included in the links from posts or articles, remove the site from your set of targets and move one.

For those sites that appear to be relevant to your audience and in which there is no evidence of the nofollow tag, make sure that you produce material that is of genuine use to visitors. One ever popular technique is to search for relevant questions raised around subjects related to your own mini site. You then add a materially useful response to the social media site, perhaps covering the issues in some – but not complete – detail and include a link to a highly detailed and relevant piece on your own site which completes and adds value to your explanation. Simply adding an “I’ve answered it here” post isn’t sufficient as it doesn’t provide the site social media site owner with any content of value to be associated directly with their own domain.

This approach allows you to put most of the effort into the piece on your mini site (which will of course add to your own content score over time) and to re-use this effectively by creating multiple value-added posts pointing at it. If the quality of your material is at the right level and the relevance is good, you should find that many of the posts will be accepted and the link duly added.

Article sites and directories
Whilst these remain a popular form of promotion for both new and established sites, it is important to recognise that with the exception of DMOZ and the Yahoo directories (both of which will require that you have significant original material on the site and are pretty hard to enter sites with significant affiliate links present on them), the value of article sites and directories as link partners has diminished over the last two to three years. Although we are not huge fans of the dreaded green bar Google page rank indicator here at lammo.net (because it is so infrequently updated and is but one of many ranking factors), it IS a useful indicator as to whether the lower level pages in directories and article sites are actually being ranked. If you can find articles from an article site highly ranked in the search engines or you can see that the detail pages or an article site or directory have a page rank above zero, it may be worth the effort. If not, move on!

Buying links
Tempting as it may be in the early days of promoting an unranked site and despite the number of webmasters who will happily offer you a link for a fee, never go down this road. This is explicitly against the search engines’ terms of service. Through senior contacts in the industry we know that it IS reported and it IS penalised when discovered.

Self promotion
One historically popular solution has been for affiliates to use their own site(s) to link back to a new mini-site. Most affiliates have more than one site so it is arguably fairly simple to link to your mini site from several sources. If you have an established site that gets plenty of traffic and is steadily climbing the search rankings then linking to your new mini site could surely prove to be advantageous? The issue here is that the search engines dislike site networks. They are easy to detect: common IP addresses, WHOIS data, nameservers and so forth. Even if you keep all of these elements separate and distinct for each of your sites, excessive linking between a set of sites has been known to be penalised. Why? From a search engine perspective, this mirrors the behaviour of many low rent link building firms who constantly hit the same database of targets with link requests and over time accidentally create a “warm network” effect as a result. Similarly, many linking solutions use collectively owned (often by the link builders themselves) site networks, numbering thousands of separate domains, in order to appear to “trade” links for their clients. There is usually little value in these domains and the search engines are on a mission to weed them out from the SERPs results. Inversely, cross-links from multiple mini sites to one central domain are generally held to be akin to a “doorway” approach and are equally likely to incur the wrath of the search engines. By cross-linking between your own web properties you are mirroring questionable techniques and running the risk of a penalty – including the potential loss of those hard won rankings for your more established sites. Avoid!

Timings
Those first five links are essential. Natural, unique links to relevant and significant topics that are not reciprocated are the goal. Social networking sites are potentially powerful allies if you can get the technology to work in your favour, but there’s no guarantee of instant success. Whatever the initial set of sites you choose as link partners, it is important to recognise that it will take time – often many months – before you see any significant effect on search engine rankings as a result of your link building efforts. Until your site has a visible Google page rank and is appearing reasonably highly in the results for relevant search terms, it makes sense to continue to focus on offering value in the form of content in starting the long journey of building solid rankings.

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