Comment on SEO AdSense WordPress Theme by SEO Dave.

AdSense Publisher ID Got your AdSense/SEO theme order and it’s been emailed out.

Your question was time sensitive, so should be answered promptly, also if I don’t respond to a comment right away with 50+ WordPress installations each with comments enabled, I never get around to a comment I plan to respond to later!

I wrote an article on the Google Sandbox Effect a while back:

The research I did at the time still stands up to most sites I’ve created since, been the odd exception like my general election site that by about 5 months was where I’d expect it to have been at 9 months, but then it might have been I over estimated the difficulty of the niche (I left it a bit late (11 months before the election) for targeting the 2010 general election SERPs, but looking back others like major news sources left it even later (many didn’t start until January)) and did more SEO work (link building) than it needed to achieve what I wanted. Just started a site on the 2012 Summer Olympics, started very early on that one, so will be interesting to see how it does: straight in at number 1 for “Summer Olympics 2012 Forum”, which is the name of the site, but there’s no real competition, so the real SERPs are like “Summer Olympics 2012” (not in the top 100).

What’s certain is a new link to any site/page takes about 9 months to pass full benefit and a site that’s got those aged links is given a sort of trust status in Google. The trust status is hard to build in any domain, basically for a domain to be trusted it needs it’s backlinks to have been live for over a year and to have a reasonable number of backlinks: there’s probably going to be a factor related to the trust of the domains the backlinks are from as well, but that was hard to test, so can’t be sure.

When you have a trusted domain new content tends to rank relatively high with only a small number of internal links, how high depends on how trusted the domain is. When a site like the BBC adds a new page, it will tend to rank quite high because the BBCs domain is very trusted. This initial ranking can then be built on with new incoming links from both more internal links (which pass full link benefit immediately) and links from external sources that take about 9 months to pass full link benefit.

By understanding this you can see splitting similar content over three domains might not be the best way to use that content. You’ve got to find links for three domains and by splitting your links between three domains, none of them will achieve maximum trust status (relative to if the links went to one domain). If your three domains do get to a trust status and you make backlinks changes, lets say you add a new article to each and link the three new articles together, those non internal links are not going to pass full SEO benefit for about 9 months. If all three articles was on the one domain, they’d have full link benefit from the internal links immediately and pass full link benefit via internal links immediately.

All that being said, I don’t always take this into account and you can with more effort get over these hurdles, but it is a lot more SEO effort.

You should be careful with interlinking three domains, I’ve tested this and it can go wrong. I’ve had sites with excessive interlinking not downgraded and others downgraded. Did some SEO tests that suggested inter linking related domains was safe as long as the links made sense, so rolled out what I’d learnt in the test to real sites.

I own a set of classic literature domains which includes multiple sub domains and I used to have them all linked to one another from the menu as in effect they were part of the same site (based on my SEO tests should have been safe to interlink a lot). In this example the domains were not downgraded, but when I tried similar with search engine optimization niche domains, where though the niche was the same, the sites had separate identities and the domains lost Google rankings!

Google gives the impression almost everything they do is automated, but over the years some of the domains (SEO test sites and non test sites) I’ve had hit by Google pushes me to believe they do a fair amount of manual downgrading. In the examples above the classic literature linking together was acceptable (they were pretty much the same site), but the SEO domains wasn’t acceptable, deemed gaming the search engines!

So be careful, I tend towards a very small amount of interlinking as it’s not worth the risk.

David