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Showcasing links through link warehouses

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 10, 2008 in Link Theory

A couple of years ago I coined the expression ‘link warehouse’ in a blog comment. I had been using link warehouses for a long time but had not really shared the idea before. A few days later I wrote a post on SEOmoz that explained the link warehouse idea in greater depth.

A link warehouse is just a page where you provide transient links to static content. Sound familiar? Sure. It sounds like a free-for-all page. However, a link warehouse is not open to the public like a free-for-all page. Only you, the warehouse operator, use the page. Furthermore, the link warehouse showcases your content for your visitors (regardless of whether they are people or robots). Free-for-all pages originated as add-ons for personal Web sites; they were only ever supposed to be secondary content.

I went on to point out that sites like CNN, ABC, et. al. use link warehousing all the time. They create link showcases to help promote new content. The new links scroll of their very active, frequently crawled entry pages but the new content is indexed.

Link warehousing works faster than submitting XML sitemaps to search engines when you’re getting new content crawled and indexed. A good link warehouse should be able to launch at least 100 Web sites a year (assuming you only cycle one link slot twice a week). People don’t pay money for link warehouse slots but, to me, they are worth their weight in gold. If a link doesn’t pass value within a few days it’s not really worth having, if you’re interested in being crawled and indexed. Who wants to wait six weeks to six months for links to be updated and crawled?

A good link warehouse actually promotes links to new content all the time. Most of its links should be transient. You don’t want the anchor text. You don’t want the PageRank. You want the crawling and indexing. You can get PageRank and anchor text later on when your content appears in the search index.

Many people complain that it’s difficult for them to get links to sites that don’t appear in search engines. I can well understand the reluctance of many site operators when it comes to linking out to new content. But there are some sites that do almost nothing but link to new content and, frankly, there is no reason why you cannot or should not create some of your own.

Link warehouses don’t have to rank well for anything. They just need to be recrawled and reindexed at least twice a week (daily would be killer, of course). Many popular blogs can act as link warehouses. If you get enough links pointing to your blog, and if you ping the major blog indexing services each time you post, your blog should become a pretty effective link warehouse relatively quickly.

In today’s SEO community, where most people are focused on blind link building, the SEO who prepares and maintains a strong link warehouse has an advantage over everyone else. You can get substantial Web sites crawled and indexed pretty quickly without committing to extensive, long-term linking resources. A good Web site has sufficient internal linkage to help the crawlers stay interested (of course, if you’re nofollowing internal links you should not waste your link warehouse on a self-blocking site).

If you create link bait you probably already use one or more link warehouses. If you’re just manipulating social media sites for links you’re not creating link bait. Link bait really does attract links because people want to talk about it. Real link warehouses help you create search visibility but the content attracts the links on its own merit. If you’re using 50 sock puppet accounts to build DIGGs, SPHINNs, or whatever you’re neither link baiting nor link warehousing. You’re just building links on social media sites.

A link warehouse’s most valuable asset is its crawl, and the value it provides to Web site promotion is derived solely and distinctly from its crawl. A link showcase helps people find new content that they will want to link to and discuss. The best of both worlds is to have a site that acts as both a link warehouse and a link showcase.

Nonetheless, you can create these types of sites yourself. You don’t have to go abuse other people’s resources. In fact, creating your own link warehouse is more efficient than living life as a link locust. If you just move from linking resource to linking resource, burning through its value mindlessly because idiots on SEO blogs and forums tell you to do that, you are constantly hungering for new resources. If you build and nurture your own link warehouse you’ll learn to practice more effective, long-term search engine optimization.