We have noticed a recent trend for companies to commission several websites that link back to their main website as satellite websites. Often these websites are little more than a mini-website that details a small part of the main business and the intention is that the more websites that link to your own, the bigger the boost you’ll get in your search engine rankings.
While it’s true that links from other websites boost your website ranking, they only have a major benefit if the linking website has a good quality rating by Google and other search engines. Google assigns all websites a rating called ‘PageRank’ which is a simple out of ten rating of a website’s quality, traffic, popularity etc. Major websites such as facebook.com or bbc.co.uk have a PageRank of 10 / 10, SME’s can be happy with page ranks of 2 to 4 out of 10.
Check your PageRank at this website: http://www.checkpagerank.net/
In truth, no one other than Google knows exactly what factors contribute to PageRank but it’s fairly easy to deduce that desirable factors like good quality content, regularly updated content, fast-load times, good quality coding etc contribute to higher Page Rank. Links back from websites with a higher PageRank give your website a boost, backlinks from websites with a lower PageRank have little effect.
Here’s a direct quote from Google’s Webmaster tools help section:
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In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.
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For a good short summary of factors that improve your website ranking visit this page: http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html
So, if you own a lot of URL’s, and want to give your main website a boost, you need to concentrate on quality. Setting up, for example, a blog means that you can update the content regularly and share on social media. This is a good option as it should encourage interested parties to comment and further boost the satellite website’s PageRank. Only then will it give your main website a boost.
