Multiple Sites Drive massive traffic but are not conventional Doorways !

Thursday, December 21, 2006

For reasons of confidentiality, I will not go into any level of detail, but suffice it to say that I've recently run into a few interesting web marketing industries where the leaders have 5-6 times as many product info (essentially great linkbait) sites as they have to commerce sites, many with appropriate but long and cumbersome URLs.

The traffic even to the smaller information (authority?) sites establishes them all via Alexa as being in the top 100,000 - translating to some pretty reasonable traffic (at least thousands daily), with a strong balance from natural search and revisits, supplemented with moderate, but not aggressive PPC terms that are industry slang.

During a review with that site manager, it was surprising to see their reaction after looking more closely at the big picture. Initially, the client thought the competitor was spending money foolishly, somewhere on the order of several times what the main commerce site cost (and with hundreds to thousands of inbound links to even the smaller site) ... but as we ran assessments with some reasonable speculation (based on related data), it became evident that the strategy works well.

When building links for larger industry organizations, with participatory memberships that span many companies and geographies, it is not uncommon to request 5-10 outbound separate links with a single party (imagine the economies of scale).

The other question that came up was "Aren't these doorway pages" - and I would say "Absolutely NOT!" - these other sites provide valuable if not at least helpful information and essentially serve to support 'authorities' (experts) serving under multiple domain, that reference or filter from many to a few commerce sites.

technorati tags: Internet-Authority, Multiple-Domains, Doorways, Links, eBusiness