Backlinks, PageRank, and Blogger

Posted by stuart as , , , , ,

Lot’s of interesting chat going on in Tom’s little corner of the world at Nothing-Ventured.org about one page sites at the moment.

One thing that specifically caught my eye was a comment by Empress about using single page sites to throw some page rank loving back to a main site.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, as I run all my sites from a single reseller hosting account, any links between my sites will be of little or no value in terms of pagerank, because they’re all on the same IP.

Now I could go off and get a whole pile of $5 a month hosting accounts and spread my sites around that way - but let’s look at the cost of doing this. (Keeping in mind that most new sites I put up are on sub-domains of existing sites, therefore cost me nothing. I couldn’t do this if I moved all my sites on to different hosting accounts)

Let’s say I run 10 small sites and blogs, I need ten hosting accounts, at $5/month = $50/month = $600/year
10 domain names at, say, $9/year = $90/year.

So now we’re at an annual cost of $690 for hosting and domains. That’s $57.50 per month, before I start to turn any kind of profit. Ouch!

Now I have another idea - let me say firstly, that I’m in no way any kind of expert on off-page SEO, or how the Blogger network works, but I have to assume that Blogger spreads its hosting around a whole pile of datacenters around the planet.

The question is, how does Blogger determine which blogs are served from which servers? I’m guessing that they use some sort of geo-IP targeting, hosting the blogs on the nearest server to the location from which it was created.

If this were the case, it may be possible to create a whole stack of Blogger accounts, each one of them created through a different proxy in a different location around the world. Put a couple of articles relating to your subject on each one (the content wouldn’t need to be that good, just re-hashed PLR articles maybe?), linking back to a main site.

This would create a catalogue of backlinks from relevant pages with different IP’s. Admittedly, the pages sending the link loving back to your main site would not have high PR, but I wonder whether the “every little bit helps” theory might apply here?

There’s a miriad of reasons why this might not work, and it’s debateable whether the time spent doing this would be better spent building quality content or “real” backlinks, but it’s something to think about.