Hello all
I once was top ten, mostly top five and often top result on all the major search engines on one of the now hottest keywords out there, this was up until about 4 years ago. It was then that I watched pages mostly using black SEO take the top pages. Money and traffic was still getting better so I just did not worry about that part of things. I am still for the most part in the top 100 but as you know position 45 and a five dollar bill will get you a pastry and coffee with a little left for the tip. The reason for the drop is two fold, 1000 x times the number of sites there used to be competing for the word, and I have really been coasting for some time as far as SEO goes. If your wondering what the word is look up at my user name, (hint it isn’t search).

I actually have a lot of content that I can gather. Roughly 50,000 pages of stuff all related in some way to my primary topic. It is of course all data driven. All my stuff is on 4 separate sites. One is a forum about 20.000 posts and growing, one concerns land based poker about 2000 pages of things, one is a book store that uses AWS (Amazon web services) and has 40,000 pages indexed, and the other is about online poker, and uses a mirror while I figure out what to do with it. They all range from 3-5 in link popularity. I get a lot on keyword niche hits with rather obscure terms. All of them link back to each other with run of the site links and none of them share any content with each other. I had read that the popularity is not from sites that link back to you but from individual pages. In the late 90’s I used Zeus and had an extensive link exchange going, but no longer support that. The plan now is to exchange links, but pick the sites carefully and go with only top quality sites, more on this below.

I am not really looking for tactical answers, I can read here to get most of those, my questions are strategic in scope.
The first thought is my general approach. Is it better to have separate sites like I do now or build one giant site, a portal? The sites that tend to rank well with competitive keywords seem to be rather busy on the front page with internal text links heavy with related search terms (you know Widgets.com, blue widgets, black widgets, big blue widgets etc), so my thinking is that it might be better to have a united site. I am thinking that my front page has to target the primary keyword, and my top level links have to target the key phrases (around the key word) and all work together with content that supports this. Could you please share your thoughts on this?

This next question may be borderline black SEO, but keep in mind that I am looking for the white SEO answer, not how to cheat, and am rather naive about what is right or wrong in this case and also the only standard seems to be in the final analysis is what the SE think is right and wrong, or subject to abuse.
All my sites are data driven and it is a rather simple thing to have duplicate content on different sites. In the case that I combine all my data onto one site I do have some particular issues, first being my existing forum. The forum is pretty well branded with the domain that it is now on. Is it considered black SEO to share the forum between sites? The content and posts all the same, the borders and domain reflect whatever site.
Take this some steps further, I use web services, I have polls, user feed back, etc when does it become a mirror when the sites are not mirrors? Links to discussion about this, thoughts about this are all very much appreciated.

The last question I have is about link exchanges. I don’t like link pages, I think they are crap for the most part, and while the web site may have great link popularity, the link pages usually does not. Anyway my thought is that I would be better off looking for good sites with lots of content and pages like the ones I manage, and do run of the site text link exchanges rather then the “links” page. Is this a valid method? Are there pitfalls? Does it effect link popularity if the links are below the fold, in the footer for example? Is there popularity problems having external links on every page? Should I limit this approach to a small number of sites, say 4-5 or less?

Thanks for any comments on any or part of this.

Tough one, most of sites I've looked at in that sector drive a coach and horses through the linkage guidelines with apparent impunity, though if the sword ever falls having one large site without RoS links to different domains may well be the safer option, IMO.

Thanks Glen
I quote "through the linkage guidelines "
and ask what linkage guidlines? Were can I look at this?

* Were can I look at this?

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

Do not participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/guidelines.html

There's a fair amount of speculation on what may constitute a "links scheme", but over- interlinking a domain network is generally accepted as being one of them.

Yeah I read that at Google. Wonder what they would consider over linking, I use ROS with linking between my sites and observe that many large sites seem to do that. I would think that is acceptable since it is common practice and just plain what you should do.
For example I have the book store, and have links there back to all my sites in the main navigation just because the store was designed to serve my other sites and I want user to be able to get back to my other sites, so this might be raising a red flag at Yahoo or google? :eek:

IMO there are no hard and fast rules, it all depends on the site in question and the sector it's in, with G we often see problems when link schemes that may "work" in say holiday/hotels/gambling are applied in the more "genteel" sectors.

One example comes to mind:

I know of one individual whose website was first-page on Google (give or take). However, he's the "I know better than the people I pay to do this stuff for me" type, so he kept breaking his website.

We told him to stop adding links, it'd hurt him. He said, yes, he would listen to us and stop adding links. Shortly after, he called us angrily to find out why his website's rank had just shot down hundreds of places.

We looked at his site. Right after telling us he'd stop adding links, he bought a ton of links and add them to his site.

So, he was heavily penalized by search engines.


I'd say that adding some links isn't a problem. Adding a bunch of related links over time isn't a problem. Buying a ton of links just to add links to your site... that's a problem, because it's antiorgnaic.