Alternative Link Building Strategies

Sometimes, your link building activities should or must take place on a secondary domain, away from your focal point (primary domain). There are several reasons this might be:

1. No advertising.
   You want to publish quality content with no hint of advertising on the same domain, whether to build trust or some other reason.
2. Technical difficulties.
   Your focal point domain does not allow for easy content management.
3. Keyword domains.
   You may have keyword domains that you’d like to utilize.
4. Split testing.
   You want to try split testing of content and keywords. What text is more effective in getting click-through to your primary domain?
5. Ranking for multiple terms.
   You want your primary domain to rank for multiple terms. Build pages with suitable anchor text on an external contributes to the success of this goal. It may not be sufficient in and of itself, but it helps.
6. Unfavorable primary domain.
   Maybe your primary domain has a stigma attached, as far as readers are concerned. This may be the domain name, the content, the products and services sold, or the layout.
7. Multiple clients.
   You have multiple clients that fall into the same market that you’d like to promote simultaneously. For example, dog trainers. Building a neutral authority site with quality content that provides “relevant links” in the body of each article to each of your clients is a suitable way to do this.

Yes, your primary domain does not get the PR, but if you’re just looking to drive targeted traffic, there’s nothing wrong with indirect link building. Dosh Dosh has a more detailed treatment of using sub-domains or separate domains to build links.