Hello,

Someone asked me for help with the following question. They have purchased thousands of links which are related to a similar theme. I don't know if he wants me to divulge the theme, so I won't mention it for now. What I will say is that each URL is related to a particular geographic area. So, for instance, he has xxxchicago, xxxboston, xxxCalifornia, etc (not all the URLs are that uniform, some may be xxxCity, others yyyCity, etc). He would like to put adsense on each of these URLs and find a way to bring traffic to them. In particular, he wants to know if he can cross link his URLs without getting penalized and if there would be any benefit to doing so. If there would be benefit to doing so, how should he go about it? A more general question would be how to optimize for all of these URLs. He wants to start out focusing on 600 URLs for now, perhpas optimizing 30 at a time (one potential strategy). Any ideas of how to do this? Thanks and be well.

All the best,

Moshe

it would be easier if he used subdomains (and cheaper)...but it's definitely possible. I would recommend using a database on the backend, so he can modify the cross-linking easily.

It would help if he also gets inbound links from other sites too, this is where directories come in.

It is important that since you (or that person) would need to have some control over the link building process, and as suggested by chovy, you need a backend system. That will help you manage things much more easily and better. I think I would use subdomains for such a seemingly huge task otherwise, each section would be in a folder of it's own, generating pages such as www.yourdomain.com/boston/art.html (http://www.yourdomain.com/boston/art.html), and so on.

It'a a delicate situation. He can cross-link related pages, such as:

xxxBoston <-> xxxNewYork

He could also try

xxxBoston <-> yyyBoston

but this is very iffy from an SEO standpoint - but if there's commercial value to the cross-linking then go for it (e.g. used CDs and concert tickets have no SEO connection, but an obvious commercial relationship)

And make sure you find some way of systematically analyzing the quality and characteristics of all those links that were purchased. I've had projects where wide-scale links were involved, and it pays HUGELY to detect and weed-out the garbage links.