Yes, there is definitely at least one specific instance where you can actually wind up making more money from your money-making site by removing it from Google’s index (or at least by banning the Googlebot from most of the site) than from leaving it in the index. But wait! Isn’t Google the bread and butter of your traffic stream? Surely this is blasphemy!

Nope, it isn’t blasphemy…in retrospect, it’s just common sense, but it still took me a long time to figure it out…

Many of us who make a living online own two fairly distinct types of sites: we have sites which are primarily rich in original content, and we have sites which are primarily for selling products or services. (Some sites do both, of course.) A common tactic for the web marketer is to place a link from a content-rich site (call it Site A) to a selling site (call it Site B).

Let’s review why you would ever link Site A to Site B:

• You want to enhance the standing of Site B in the eyes of search engines, or
• You want to send traffic (i.e., potential customers) from Site A to Site B, or
• You want to do both at the same time.

It’s clear that links from Site A to Site B can have a positive impact on Site B, under any of the above metrics; i.e., they can enhance the standing of Site B, they can send potential customers to Site B, and they can do both. But what of the impact of those links on Site A?

Generally speaking, sites rich in original content are favored by Google and other search engines, while selling sites are not. Some selling sites (e.g., affiliate sites) are downright unpopular with Google. We’ve been told that much by Google directly. We’ve also been told that linking to ‘bad neighborhoods’ can reduce a site’s standing. In short, linking from Site A, which is rich in original content, to Site B, which is primarily a selling site and is perhaps even an affiliate site, can harm the standing of Site A in the eyes of search engines.

This much probably sounds pretty obvious so far, and it is…but for me, anyway, the consequences of really thinking it through weren’t so obvious at first.

The main consequence for present purposes is just this: if Site B is competing in a niche where it is extremely difficult or even virtually impossible for a site of its type (e.g., an affiliate site) to achieve high SERPs standings anyway, then the search engine-related value of the link from Site A is essentially wasted. In other words, if your link from Site A to Site B manages to improve the rank of Site B from 4,687,232 in the SERPs for a given term to 4,592,386 in the SERPs, it hasn’t really helped at all in terms of organic search traffic. Either way, that SERPs positioning is worth zero. But it probably has hurt Site A in terms of organic search traffic.

To put it differently, looking just in terms of search engine impact, your link from Site A to Site B does very little good for Site B but does harm Site A. How much does it harm Site A? In a sense, it doesn’t matter: if it harms Site A at all, in return for no significant positive impact on organic search traffic for Site B, then on balance, the link is deleterious to your overall strategy in terms of search engine standing.

In fact, the problem is worse than this, because when you harm the organic search traffic to Site A, you harm the click thru traffic to Site B (other things being equal, fewer organic visitors to Site A yields fewer clicks thru to Site B). So what’s a person to do? You don’t just want to remove the link altogether, because then you’ll lose all that traffic to Site B from Site A.

Simple: remove Site B from Google’s index altogether, so it becomes an ‘unknown’. It is better to be an unknown site, about which Google remains agnostic, than to be a site known to be in Google’s bad books (such as an affiliate site). And since Site B was competing in a niche where it would have been nearly impossible to achieve high organic SERPs positioning anyway, the bottom line is that it is better to give up the struggle to improve SERPs via linking, in order to preserve or enhance the standing of Site A, which can go on to deliver as much or more traffic to Site B.

The one caveat to this conclusion is that if Site B has a particularly short or recognizable domain name, and thus receives some traffic as a result of people typing the domain name directly into Google’s search box rather than their browser’s address bar (why do people do that?), it may be preferable not to remove the site completely, but rather just to block the Googlebot from accessing anything except the front page. In that case, it is also worth ensuring that the front page of the site is not going to get Site B categorized unfavorably by Google. Whether it is worth keeping one page in Google can probably be answered just by checking your logs to see how much search engine-based type-in traffic the site receives.

So there it is: that is the specific circumstance under which you may actually make more money by removing a revenue-generating site from Google altogether!