Link Equity and Authority Consolidation
About 2 months ago Oilman posted about how Digg was wasting some of their authority by splitting their brand and link equity across at least 3 domains. Given the following conditions
- there is a virtually unlimited number of ways to build links
- some link sources can be authoritative, parasitic, and long term
- Google's general goal is to be hard to manipulate and list information over commercial results
- most old authorities react slowly to market changes and don't sell their authority in a manner that is relevant to the current market
It makes sense that Google would want to promote a site with 10 quality links much more than they would want to promote 2 sites with 5 quality links each. Consolidating and controlling your link authority is exceptionally important.
Many websites still make errors when doing authoritative things by not providing a focused linkpoint on their own site for an idea. A couple examples:
- Many book authors write a book and then never create a page on their own site which is the defining resource for their own book, and thus allow one of the larger bookstores or ecommerce platforms to take the default rankings for their brand.
- Many people use SurveyMonkey or some other source for surveys. If their survey / contest gets popular then they throw away a bunch of their link equity by having it all point at an external source.
- Many people blow their marketing by announcing too many things at once, instead of double or triple dipping on the plublicity.
Comments
Heh. I was thinking that the less sites you have, the better. You can always open a new related section on your main site.
However, it'd make sense to have a separate domain for a site about a different topic/industry.
Yeah, the trend for microsites should probably only be reserved for the big brands.
Intersing and I agree, but I wonder about the concept of creating a presence in areas you might not be able to without allowing your brand on another site.
Say for some reason I was interested in getting my brand across to myspacers. It's likely that I would be more successful by creatng a profile in that community and drawing the community to my profile instead of to my main site. I could direct people from my profile to my site if I chose, but I might not ever get any of those people to notice me wihout allowing my brand in their space.
An author who gives away the defning source of information for their book to another site could be attempting to take advantage of the publishers more dominant space in the market.
I do agree with you, but just wondering if you would agree that there can be benfits in giving up a little control over your brand if done in certain ways.
I think it is a good idea to be seen on multiple fronts, but this post was more about how a lack of strategy and thinking about link equity etc. cause people to flat out waste some of their best assets.
After the user activity has come and gone, where do the links point? That is an important thing to consider.
I agree with your concept but disagree with the example. Digg.com gets so very many backlinks that splitting their brand isn't really hurting them. Digg is in the link business and does things like incenting people to link their blog to a digg ref rather than the news article. This gives them a good bit of authority and IMHO allows them to ignore "link authority" considerations and focus on what they think will be best from a human user standpoint. That's the right focus to have I think.
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