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WARNING: This is NOT a skimmable email.

Don't skim-read this.

If you do, it will be worthless to you.

If you don't have time right now to read it,
put it away and come back later and read it.

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Review of 'Revenge of the Mini-Net'

Rating: Worthy of a Summary

I am summarizing this because the info is
REALLY good, but there's not a lot of it.

This summary is definitely worth the read if
you're at all involved in any kind of SEO.

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This summary includes my recommendations for:

- Building Mini-Nets for *Adsense Sites*
- Super important info for Hosting a Mini-net
- How to not get labeled as a link farm!
- How to FOOL the Search Engines and look natural.

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The biggest problem I have with this book is
the price.

$80

Not that the info isn't worth $80, because it
can certainly be used to make you more than $80.

But, I figure, why should you have to pay $80
for a book that I can summarize in one email?

Do I think the info is worth reading?

Absolutely!

In fact, I think that if you're not building
mini-nets, you're leaving money on the table.

I've been building them for years and the fact is

They Work!

--->
So, here's the summary, mixed in with my own
advice and experience:

Basically the book describes how to use a group of
sites to create authority pages and an
authority site.

An authority page is one that lots of other
pages link to, but it doesn't link to many
others.

An authority site is a site with lots of
authority pages.

You want to build authority pages because they
get ranked highly in the search engines.

Authority pages can be used to

1. Drive traffic from search engines/other sources
2. Make sales

I drew a diagram of how this works.  It
might make this easier to follow along:

http://www.whatscrapandwhatsnot.com/wp-content/images/mini-net-diagram1.jpg

—>
You accomplish the authority site concept by
building your main site around a niche.

Then, you build lots of other sites around
tighter niches that are closely related to
your main sites niche.

Then, you link them together.

No, not all of them.  That would be un-natural.

Link them like this:

Site A is your main site.

Site B, C, D, E are your sub-sites.

You link the homepage of site B to the
homepage of site A and to the homepage of
site C.

You DON’T link site B to sites D or E.

You link C to A and D.

You link E ONLY to A.  I don’t think you
should create a loop of links.

—>
You focus site B around a sub-niche of site A.

So, for example, if your main site is
about Digital Cameras, site B might be
about ‘Sony Digital Cameras’.  Site C
might be about “SLR Digital Cameras”, and
site D might be about “Kodak Digital Cameras.

You can build as many of these sub-sites as
you want, as long as they’re all related to
your main site.

Also, you need to have pages on your main site
to link to from the sub sites.  You should NOT
always link to the homepage of site A.

Site A should have at least one page on it
about ‘Sony Digital Cameras’, ‘SLR Digital Cameras’,
‘Kodak Digital Cameras’, …, …

Then, each of your sub-sites should link to
the related page on the main site.

Also, each of the sub-pages on each sub-site
should link to the homepage of the sub-site.

That’s the main concept.

Look at this diagram:

http://www.whatscrapandwhatsnot.com/images/mini-net-diagram1.jpg

and it will make more sense.

——————————————–
A few implementation details
——————————————–
1. Use keywords in your linking between pages
and sites.

        MAKE SURE YOU VARY YOUR ANCHOR TEXTS!!!

        Don’t always link to the homepage of site A with
        ‘Digital Cameras’.

        You’ll get penalized by the SE’s if you do.

        Use “cheap digital cameras”, “click here”, “camera”,
        “these guys”, …

2. Make sure your sites are related.
        The whole point of this is that SE’s are
        majorly discounting links from sites that aren’t
        related to each other.

        But, pages that are related and are linking
        to each other, are getting and giving major
        boosts.

3. The homepage of any given site doesn’t link to
all it’s sub-pages.  The homepage links to the
sitemap, which in turn links to the sub-pages.

        This ensures that your homepage doesn’t have
        ton’s of outgoing links.  Remember, it’s
        supposed to be an authority page.

        Make sure you’re accounting for usability for your
        users when designing this.  Google is getting
        better and better at figuring out usability and
        penalizing sites that aren’t very user friendly.

4. Put your mini-net sites on different hosting
accounts.

        MAKE SURE YOU HAVE DIFFERENT CLASS-C IP ADDRESSES.

        If you don’t, SE’s KNOW these links aren’t natural.

        Make sure your accounts are spread out geographically.
        IP addresses are geographical.

5. Mix up the WhoIs info for all your sites.

        If you don’t change the whois info, SE’s will know
        they’re all owned by the same person.

        Or, if all of them are private, they’ll take a
        guess that they’re all owned by the same person.

        A natural site gets links from lots of other sites
        with lots of different kinds of whois data.

6. Use different templates for your mini-net sites.

        I’m not saying this will affect the mini-net right
        now, but down the road I’m willing to bet it will.

7. Don’t spam the SE’s trying to get indexed.

        If you build a mini-net like this, it WILL get indexed.

        Just let it act naturally.  Otherwise, you’re just
        asking for them to index then un-index your site.

8. Build the mini-net over time.

        It’s not natural for a site to get built, and then
        within the same week 5 other sites are built that
        all link to that main site.  Then, no other sites
        ever pop up that link to it.

        Build one mini-net site each month or something
        like that.  Stagger them.

        Make it look natural.

9. Using this for adsense sites
        If you’re building mini-nets for adsense sites
        let me give a few recommendations.
        1. Don’t build a bunch of hand built sites
        until you KNOW the industry is easy to rank for.
        Obviously if you’re using computer generated
        sites, this doesn’t apply.
        2. A mini-net WILL help get your sites indexed.
        Build the main site, then build the other 3-6
        sub-sites and then buy a link to one of the last
        sub-sites in the chain (like, to site D or E).

——————————————–
Why are you doing this?
——————————————–

Everyone knows that SEO is all about links.

Linking used to be about just getting as
many incoming links from as many pages as
you could.  It didn’t matter if they were
good pages or if they were related to your
site.

Not anymore.

Now, a link from a pr2 page that is
directly on topic for your page is worth
more often times than is a link from
a page that is a pr6 but is completely
off-topic.

Building these sites you will now control
links that are laser targeted to your
content.

For SEO, this is huge!

——————————————–
Conclusion
——————————————–

Building a mini-net will almost always
increase the traffic for a website

…as long as it’s done correctly.

One of the criticisms of this method is that
it looks like it is a black hat method.

Googles webmaster guidelines say not to do anything
to increase your pagerank or to try and trick the SE.

As long as you’re doing this (building your mini-net)
with the intent to help your customers  you’ll
be ok.

If you’re giving them more and more good
information on each mini-net site, you’ll
be ok.

If you’re using computer generated content,
don’t mix it with real stuff you care about.
Just build lots of computer generated sites
that link to each other in this fashion.

Just be smart about not giving Google any data
that will let them group all the sites together.

Also, Building lots of little sites that all
pull in traffic is much safer than having
one site that pulls in all your traffic.  When a
serp update comes, you’re much less likely to get
wiped out if you have lots of little sites
doing work than if you have just one big site.

If you’re doing a lot of SEO, this book is worth
reading:

http://www.revengeofthemininet.com/

John

PS.  I’m willing to answer questions about this.

If this email coupled with the diagram isn’t clear,
let me know.