Thursday, October 26, 2006

Is a feeder site clever or wasteful?

I have posted variations of this question onto two seo forums. No answers so far....
webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?t=14399
ttp://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=14694

I have a major site that I am trying to promote in the search engines, it's for home education.

Time4Learning is the site that I'm trying to primarily promote. It's a kids education site with lessons and a playground (for recess after studying).

To support Time4Learning.co with traffic and links, I created what I think of as a "feeder site", http://www.learninggamesforkids.com. It is made up of a few of the learning games that make up the "playground" of the primary site.

I created it as a free site since I felt that I could get more websites to link to it since many of them will only link to "free" sites. [Never mind that "free" usually means advertising-based or something full of to-play-the-second-part-of-this-game-click-here-to-accept-a-few-special-downloads" triggering an installation of crud which will take years to clean out and which is somehow justified by yahooligians as "but you clicked yes on a contract attached to the middle of a game intended for 8 year olds but now I'll get off my high horse and back to business].

I could put these activities on a page on my primary site as an example of the playground activities. I would probably get less websites to link to it but it would be directly on my main site.

Given that I am primarily interested in building Time4Learning's position in the search engines, I have 3 questions:

Question 1 - If the feeder site only has outgoing links to my primary site (which will shortly be the case), is there any SEO disadvantage to having the links coming into the feeder site?

Question 2 - If you look at learninggamesforkids.com, you'll notice that the games (some of them) are hosted elsewhere. Should I mark those links with some sort of "spiders, do not follow" to not "waste" any page rank that I'm trying to transmit to my primary site?

Question 3 - Is this whole strategy clever or misguided?

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