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Gold Silver Tin Linking Concepts

 
When building a huge network of sites, I recommend that you consider these concepts...

I like to think of sites in these terms:

Tin - High risk, spammy type sites, main purpose is to generate links and traffic to your silver and gold sites. Experiment with content and use "left over" content.

Silver - Have decent traffic, generate some revenue, but don't use your best revenue streams. Take a few risks. These sites should have good, quality, readable content.

Gold - These are your money sites. High quality and minimize risk. Put your highest quality content on these sites.

Think of this as a pyramid, that is wide at the bottom and thinner at the top. You your tin sites at the bottom, gold sites at the top, with silver in the middle.

Tin sites will link to other Tin, and up to Silver and Gold sites.

Silver sites link to Silver and up to Gold sites, but never down to Tin sites.

Gold sites - Maybe link to other Gold sites, but rarely link to Silver and never to Tin sites.

Your own gold sites should be self-hosted. I'd also consider Squidoo and Hubpages to be gold sites.

Tins sites should be "remotely" hosted on other services like free hosting accounts, blog hosting.

Silver sites should be hosted on the above, as well as sub domains.

A Gold site can be anything from a single squeeze page/sales page, to a high quality content site. However, it is a page that has any kind of VALUE. This could be good PR, makes money, has a lot of links.

A tin site can become a silver site, and a silver site can become a gold site.
 

The point is: Take a lot of chances and experiment with tin sites.
Protect your gold sites.

 
There isn't a set definition of gold, silver and tin sites. It's a concept that you are more aggressive with sites/blogs/pages that have little value, and more protective of your sites/blogs/pages that have value. The more value they are, the more conservative you should be.

If you are one of these people that think getting "a lot" of links in quickly is bad. Then build plenty of sites, lenses, hubpages, remotely hosted blogs, profile pages and get a few links to a day to a lot of pages. The goal is to gather a lot of links.

If you're afraid of linking too fast, don't take my word for it, or anyone else...Go get a bunch of these free sites and find out for yourself! Just as being over-aggressive can be bad, being too conservative is probably even worse.


WARNING: Squidoo has banned some folks for "inappropriate linking". It seems that using too many bookmarks or blog comments sets of some type of trigger. Not sure how long this will last, as it also seems like an easy way to get a competitor banned.

 
Don't Be a Thin Affiliate

IMO, you shouldn't use any affiliate revenue streams AT ALL on your remotely hosted Tin sites. You're not paying for domains or hosting, so their only purpose should be to build links and point traffic to Gold sites. Don't have fingerprints that affiliate programs leave.

Once a site is getting traffic, then and only then monetize it. Google has what it calls "thin affiliate sites". These are sites Google thinks are made just to make sales commissions and offer very little content. If you don't have any revenue streams on the page/blog/site, it's hard to be considered a "thin affiliate".

 

Link Laundering

Link Laundering is a term to describe a site that may have blackhat linking strategies, then "cleans" them and points them to a whitehat site. The concept is similar to "money laundering".

Link laundering sites are outside of the tin-silver-gold network, for the sake of this discussion.

You can use:

Forums, photo sites (think of your own niche flickr), software directories, myspace type sites, anything that has multiple users. Now, you "use" the "users" to get the blackhat/spammy links. This will insulate you and your site from the spammers.

Now use the site to send your Gold site(s) legit links and traffic.

Chart of Some Possible Linking Strategies: