Ideally, their hope is that if they link all of the smaller niche websites to the main website, that this will give that main website more credibility in the search engines.

This is what’s called a “Mini-Net”.  A set of websites that one person owns and that are all inter-linked together.

Let’s take an example shall we?

Let’s say Webmaster Joe likes the topic of hair removal.  So he builds a website that focuses on laser hair removal.  But, Webmaster Joe has also learned that if you build other, smaller websites that talk about a nichier (is that a word?) topic yet one still related to the main overall topic, and then link them together that this will help where his main website is listed in the search engines.

So Webmaster Joe creates 5 more websites all on similar but less competitive terms:

• cosmetic hair removal
• skin hair removal
• upper lip hair removal
• affordable hair removal
• hair removal surgery

These smaller, nichier sites aren’t high-quality by any means but they all have an article or two on them about the main keyword phrase they’re focused on.

The point of these additional sites is not to have them rank well but to have the main website that talks about Laser Hair Removal rank well which is his money phrase.

So Webmaster Joe visits a hosting company (HostGator is a good one that I personally recommend) and purchases a shared hosting package that allows him to have multiple websites on the same IP address.

What this means is that Webmaster Joe can add as many websites as he wants to his hosting account; doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that they’re all on the same IP address.

This is important because when search engines like Google come to pay a visit to all of these websites, they’ll see that they’re all linked together but they also all reside on the same IP address which diminishes their importance.

Think of it like this:

Let’s say that someone recommends a movie to you.  Later, five other people recommend that same exact movie to you so you start to think “Wow!  This must be a really great movie!”.  You find out later that all of these five people live in the same house, maybe they’re related to one another maybe not.  The point is, the only time you’ve gotten a recommendation to see the movie was from someone who lived in that house.

All of a sudden, that recommendation doesn’t seem so great does it?

The search engines feel the same way with websites.  Obviously if there are multiple websites all linking to one place, but all of those links reside at the same address (the IP address) of the site they’re linking to, then all of a sudden, it doesn’t look so great to the search engines.

And will eventually get you penalized.  Can I say that for certain?  Can I guarantee that?  Obviously, no, since I don’t run the search engines but I can tell you this.  It’s not something that I would recommend you trying during your online career…unless you’re into that kind of thing.

The bottom line is, a mini-net is nothing more than a group of websites usually all owned by the same website owner that link to one another in the hopes of getting better rankings for those websites.

Do these mini-nets always reside on the same IP addresses?  Obviously, no.  The savvy website owners have come to realize that this will get them penalized in the search engines, and so they’ve scoped out ways of getting around this IP issue.

Does that always work?  No.  As a matter of fact, it borders on “black hat seo” techniques.  Or in other words those techniques that the search engines frown upon.

But, that’s not the purpose of this post.  This post is to explain to you what a mini-net is and why people use it.

As always, leave your comments if you feel up to it

While you can’t prevent this all together, there are some steps that you can take, especially when it comes to your blogs in order to make it more difficult for these scrapers to take your content, or at least if they do, be sure you’re getting a link back to your site.

One of the ways is to add one of a number of free plugins to your blog.  One of these is the feed footer plugin.

This plugin adds an RSS footer to each blog post you make which contains not only a link back to this blog but which also links to the Bonehead SEO product itself.  Whenever an automated scraper makes a visit, and copies any of the content on this blog (or on any other blog that uses this plugin), the footer will automatically be included.  Now this doesn’t mean that the person stealing the content will not remove this information in order to post the content on their site, but it does add an extra step to the mix.

Another one of these plugins is one called Ozh’ Better Feed. This plugin also allows you to add a footer to your RSS feeds.  The copyright plugin also adds information to your feeds but allows for a lot more options.

Lastly, there’s the AntiLeech plugin.  This one is very unique to say the least. This plugin creates fake content for the scraper but still includes links back to your site.  When your content is stolen, it provides the thief with useless content.

So if you were ever concerned that your content was being out and out stolen on your site, or you have a fear that it might come to that in the future, just install a few of these plugins to get your protection started.

Since the client didn’t want any outgoing links and had such a high PR on the site, the person who had developed the site wanted to know if it was ok to put the same color text on the same color background on a few of the pages, linking to the developers own sites.

This is called “invisible text” and will label you a spammer, at least where the search engines are concerned.  Your own personal moral character might not feel that way but to put it frankly, that doesn’t matter.

Needless to say, I recommended (strongly I might add) that they refrain from doing so.  Actually following through and doing such a thing would likely cause not only the site with the invisible text to get banned but the site it links to, to get banned as well.

In our BoneheadSEO classes that are coming up in 2009, we’ll cover black-hat techniques in great detail so that you can be fully aware of the tactics that may get you banned.

We’ll talk soon.