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Moving from a blog to an online shop

MOH · 2009-09-08 11:26:54

I'm working on an idea for an online business. I'm thinking of testing the water by writing a blog on the subject first, building up backlinks to that and getting it ranked well, maybe promote some related affiliate products, to get an idea of traffic and conversion rates. Then leverage the blog success if I go ahead to…

08-09-2009 12:26pm

#1

MOH

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I'm working on an idea for an online business. I'm thinking of testing the water by writing a blog on the subject first, building up backlinks to that and getting it ranked well, maybe promote some related affiliate products, to get an idea of traffic and conversion rates. Then leverage the blog success if I go ahead to set up the online shop. I'm wondering about the best way to do this.

One option would be to register the shop domain and set up the blog at www.myshop.com/blog. Set the home page in the htaccess to be /blog.

Then when I'm building links, link back sometimes to specific posts, or sometimes just to www.myshop.com - which, if people visit it, will bring them to my blog.

Then when the shop goes live, simply change the htaccess so the home page is now just www.myshop.com. I'll have a whole netowrk of backlinks set up, and now anyone clicking on any of them will go to my shop instead. Links to specific posts will still work, and the blog will still sit off the main page. I'll swap out the affiliate ads and replace them with ads for my own shop.

My worry is, will google see this as some kind of 'bait and switch', given that my links no longer point to the same end page, and will I get any penalties for this.

If so, what's the best way to do it? Should the 'homepage' links I set up link to www.myshop.com/blog instead? Or should i just put the blog on a different domain altogether and link from it to the main website when I set it up?

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