Link building

It’s Google’s 10th anniversary. Yay! And in honour of that event, they’ve released a copy of Google’s index from 2001 - the oldest one they still have. You can visit it here:
http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Now, why the Yay? Because this is a link development opportunity extrodinaire. Lots of fun and opportunity here - and entire new universe was just made easily accessible.

There are three opportunities presenting themselves to you here.
First, you now have a snapshot into listings of sites in your niche that are all 7+ years old. This is a goldmine of places to go looking for links. We know that all of these sites are old and are on the most part probably full of authority and trust. So start searching and looking for links.

Secondly, this is also a goldmine of dead sites. Do some searches, you’ll find sites that were around in 2001 and ranking, but are now defunct. Is it worth resurrecting any of these sites? Domain registrations at $10 a pop, I’d suggest giving some a try.

Thirdly, you’re finding all these defunct/dead sites right? Check the backlinks to those sites. Now, go approach the sites that link to those defunct sites - send them an email. Tell them you were playing around in that Google index found their site and the dead link. You thought they’d like to know. And since they’re removing the link anyway……you just happen to know a current site that could easily replace that defunct site (that would be your site of course).

Play around. Send out some emails. Have some fun. Get some links.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know I don’t work much in social media type sites. It’s just not where my market is, and I’m suspicious that much of the traffic is junk, or full of 16 year olds who don’t have any money anyway.

But there are some redeeming qualities to some of these sites. I’m going to show you how to mine social bookmarking sites for more links.

First, go get some social bookmarking sites. 30 seconds on Google will give you more sites than you can shake a stick at. Let’s use www.diigo.com to start.

Now, we’re going to find pages on those bookmarks that are related to our niche. Continuing on with our mortgage example, let’s find mortgage related bookmarks on diigo. To do that, we do a Google search for mortgages, but add the qualifier “site:diigo.com” on the end, like this:
mortgages site:diigo.com

See? You know have a whole bunch of pages that relate to mortgages that people have bookmarked. This should bring you to two follow ups:
1) can you approach any of these folks to get them to link to you?
2) hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sites that relate to mortgages that are also popular enough that people will bookmark to them.

And we already know what to do with all those sites right? First, approach them to see if they’ll give you a link. Second, check the backlinks to these sites to find even more relevant sites to get backlinks from. Now you’ve got probably thousands and thousands of sites that will potentially give you a link. Get going!

One would expect that most of these bookmarking sites will have nofollow on their bookmarked links so they’re pretty much useless from an SEO point of view. But the list of relevant sites they’ll provide (that others in your industry have not approached) for you to mine for links is priceless.

Well, almost guaranteed. Pretty certain.

DMOZ is the directory used by Google. It’s been around forever and is very trusted. Pages in the directory are very relevant. It’s a great place to get a link.

But alas, there’s a few problems. First, it’s edited by volunteers. Lazy volunteers. Volunteers who take 2 years to review your listing before discarding it without response or reason.

Second, many categories don’t have editors. So your submission gets ignored.

Thirdly, editors are only supposed to index original content. Isn’t your site just like every other widget store in your industry? Probably. So, no listing for you.

And lastly, it’s full of corrupt dmoz editors. See, your competitors were smarter than you and signed up to be category editors 10 years ago. Now they’re in control of who gets listed. Is that going to be you? Not in a freakin’ million years.

So what’s a person to do? Easy. Volunteer to be a category editor.

Aaah, but not just ANY category editor. You volunteer to be the category editor for the town, city, or region you are in. These small regional categories are almost always crying out for an editor. And all these categores are, are business listings.

And who better than you to compile and sort through all the businesses in your town? Nobody - you’re perfect for the job! And while you’re at it, do you know of any other businesses in the area that should be listed? Like say, Oh I dunno, YOURS?

Boom. You’re listed in DMOZ. Now you can sit back and listen to everyone else moan about how they can’t get into DMOZ. You’re there and looking fine.

A few other notes. Don’t be sneaky - you’ll get caught. Be open about your business. Disclose your websites when you sign up - they don’t mind if you list your own business, that just makes sense. They do mind if you lie about it. Do some research on how to apply to become an editor to increase your chances of being selected.

And do a good job with the category. Clean it up, tighten it up, contribute to the directory. Do all that, then you’re doing your job, and there’s nothing wrong with adding your own site as a listing - you’re clean as a whistle.

There you go. Easy peasy, you’ve got a listing in DMOZ that’s under your control. No longer do you have to read about how hard it is to get listed.

Continuing on with our link development we’re continuing on in our quest to use mostly technical methods to build links. In my first post on the subject of link development we discussed checking your competitors backlinks to find places to get links. Now we’re going to discuss directories and other places we can basically automate submissions to.

But first, a message from your neighbourhood Google spam team. Be careful with this type of technique. It can get you ranked. It can also get you penalized or banned. Too much of anything in link development is a bad thing, too much paid link building can be a bad thing. Certainly it’s something the search engines would rather not see so realize too much of it and they’re going to want to slap you somehow.

Step 1 - finding directories.
Like much of link building, we use Google to find the sites we’re looking for. In this case we’re looking for footprints or signs that a website is a directory. For example, most directories would have the words ’submit your site’ on the page. So searching for ’submit your site’ should yield a good list of sites to start looking at. And sure enough it does.

Now I’ll cut to the chase and give you the list of footprints. This list has been passed around the internet for years and the original author is long lost. Whoever they are, thank you. Without further ado, assuming your business is ‘web design’, here’s some searches you can do to find sites.

“Suggest link” “web design”
“Suggest a link” “web design”
“Suggest site” “web design”
“Suggest a site” “web design”
“Suggest URL” “web design”
“Suggest a URL” “web design”
“Suggest an URL” “web design”
“Add link” “web design”
“Add a link” “web design”
“Add site” “web design”
“Add a site” “web design”
“Add URL” “web design”
“Add a URL” “web design”
“Add an URL” “web design”
“Submit link” “web design”
“Submit a link” “web design”
“Submit site” “web design”
“Submit a site” “web design”
“Submit URL” “web design”
“Submit a URL” “web design”
“Submit an URL” “web design”

“add your link” + “web design”
“add link” + “web design”
“add your site” + “web design”
“link exchange” + “web design”
“add your URL” + “web design”
“submit your link” + “web design”
“add links” + “web design”
“submit your site” + “web design”
“exchange links” + “web design”
“add new link” + “web design”
“add URL” + “web design”
“add site” + “web design”
“add a link” + “web design”
“add your website” + “web design”
“submit your website” + “web design”
“add a new link” + “web design”
“submit URL” + “web design”
“submit link” + “web design”
“request a link” + “web design”
“exchanging links” + “web design”
“submit a link” + “web design”
“trade links” + “web design”
“submit website” + “web design”
“link requests” + “web design”
“website listed here” + “web design”
“link swap” + “web design”
“add a site” + “web design”

Here’s some other directories you may consider submitting to as well:
www.dmoz.org
dir.yahoo.com
www.botw.org

Those are three of the top directories available. Dmoz is free, but hand edited and hard to get into (I’ll tell you how you can pretty much guarantee a listing in Dmoz in a later post). Yahoo’s directory is $300 bucks a year. BOTW (Best Of The Web) are run by some of the sharpest directory folks out there. If you’re going to do paid directores and focus on quality, those are the three to start at.

In addition to the above list of search terms there are numerous compiled lists of directories. One of the most popular is vilesilencer but there’s plenty of others. Do some searches on ‘paid directory lists’ and things like that; you’ll find the lists.

Step 2: Evaluating the Directory
Now you’ve got hundreds or thousands of directories you may submit to. Some free, many paid. Which ones to submit to? All?

Let me first state that I’ve seen people rank by excessive use of paid directory submissions. But I’m very very concerned about that as a long term plan. I’m pretty sure they’re going to get busted someday. So keep that in mind. My recommendation is be careful where you submit to - let the vast majority of directories go by. Find ones that are relevant if you can. Failing that, find ones that seem to have some trust (like www.botw.org). I recommend you use this link building technique as an initial foundation layer of links, not an overall or even a primary link building technique.

Anyway, try and keep in mind my previous post on judging the quality of backlinks. Most directories are going to have a lot of low end crap as their backlinks, and most will be general non-relevant sites. That’s because in the heyday of the directory site, everyone was setting up directories, building backlinks just to get PR, then selling listings for $10 a pop. But Google has hit directories pretty hard with a decline in PR and what seem to be other penalties.

So first step in judging directories - are they relevant?
Second step - are they trusted?
Next, check how many pages the site has indexed. Using your search status plugin, see how many pages Google has indexed for the site. Lots of pages, good. Not as many as you’d expect, not so good. That means Google doesn’t think the site is valuable enough to index all the pages. You can also try the search ‘mortgages site:directorysite.com’ to see what pages from the directory are in Google that relate to mortgages or whatever niche you’re in. Certainly if you find that the page you’re getting a link from is not indexed in Google you should skip the directory.

Also, look at how the directory pages are ordered and the pagination. If your company name is ZZZ mortgages and the directory lists alphabetically, you’re on the last page. If that’s on page 12 of the mortgage listings, that’s not good. You’re buried deep.

The front page of directories will list the categories in the directory. Directory software also allows them to list subcategories on the front page (i.e. instead of just listing the business category, they might show the main ‘business’ category as a listing, and below it have three or four subcategories, like mortgages and SEO). If the subcategory you want to get listed on is on the front page of the directory, that’s a good thing.

Two other factors to look at as it relates to your submission. Some directories allow rich anchor text. So if your company is Bob’s Mortgages, they will let you set up your anchor text - the text they link to you with - as ‘Shop Mortgage Rates Online’. This practice is good for you, not so good for the directory IMO (most quality directories don’t allow keyword stuffing in the anchor text). In addition, some directories will give you a base link plus another 4 or 5 links to inner pages. This is a GOOD thing, use it.

Price is the last consideration. You need to combine all the above factors and make a decision. Is $10 a good buy? Is $99 a good buy? There’s no right answer, much of this is judgement and experience based. Personally? I’d probably be buying more $50 and $100 directories than I would $10 directories. Again, use directory submission with caution. It’s a technique that’s been thoroughly chewed over and abused for years. Show the search engines your site is about quality, not quantity.

Now for an example. I run a couple niche directories. It uses custom software so I don’t leave footprints. Listings are free - but! All listings require that the website list full physical contact info, I only list ‘real’ businesses. I don’t allow keyword stuffing. And I hand process each and every submission, discarding any I don’t want to link to. The directories still rank a bit in Google for long tail search terms. I believe they pass along some good link juice to people who are listed. And I’ve had people tell me they get referrals and business from the site. That’s the kind of directory you’re looking for, if you can find them.

That’s it! Go forward and find quality directories. Pay some and submit some. Start building the initial layer of your link development. But don’t go overboard.

Link development can be broken down into two different methods. The first way is the technical way. How do I get a bunch of links to my site? This method is relatively easily taught, it can be duplicated, and can yeild decent links in reasonable volume. My first post on link development is an example of this method.

The second method turns this ideology on it’s head. Rather than looking for links, we look for sites we want a link from. Then we go after those individual and specific sites for a link. It’s now a matter of getting experience on how to get individual sites to give you a link. This method produces very low volume, but extremely high quality links.

I’ll be continuing on the topic and providing more methods for the first type of link development shortly.

A bit of a review post here, but we’re going to use this when developing backlinks. We need to be able to judge if a site is a place we want to get a link from.

Bear in mind when reading this, much of this isn’t ‘factual’. I really don’t know how Google ranks sites. Some of this stuff I’ve developed from reading. Some stuff I’ve developed from my own sites. But this stuff does work and I believe it will continue to work. So even if some of this stuff isn’t perfectly correct right now, following it does work somehow - and I expect will continue to get you ranked in the future. FWIW, the very first site I ranked was about 5 years ago. I built links for 3 months and have not touched it since. It has remained ranking reasonably well for the last 5 years - untouched.

Anyay, at this point I’ll repeat my mantra. You are known by your backlinks.

Pagerank:
Pagerank is a Google algorithm that assigns a number between 0 and 10. A pagerank (PR) of 10 is high.

Pagerank is also an iterative algorithm in that it cycles around in a loop. The more you calculate it, the more accurate it becomes. The actual calculation isn’t overly important though.

The way it works is this. Lets say I somehow have a pagerank 5 web page. If I link to you, I lose a fraction of my pagerank and you gain can some. So maybe my pagerank on that page becomes 4.8 (though keep in mind, pagerank that we see is only ever an integer) and your pagerank becomes a 3.

Your pagerank isn’t linear either. It takes a lot more to go from a pagerank 2 to a 3 than it does to go from 1 to 2. It’s generally assumed that it’s logarithmic, it takes roughly 8 times the links to go from 2 to 3 than it does to go from 1 to 2.

Now lets say you get another backlink from a pagerank 5 web page. Now your page may become a pagerank 4. And so on - the more backlinks you have from higher PR web pages, the higher your PR becomes. And if you link out to someone, you will pass a wee bit of PR to them. (It’s understood that this pagerank bleed does lower your pagerank. However you should assume the bleed is so mild that you really shouldn’t worry about it. Linking out has far bigger concerns and reasons than worring about going from a PR 5.85555 ot a PR 5.85554.

So, pagerank flows through links. The more, higher PR backlinks we have, the higher our PR is. And it’s harder to move up from a PR 5 to a 6 than it is from a 4 to a 5.

Google used to use PR heavily in their ranking. A high PR meant good rankings. I do not believe this is the case anymore - I believe the PR described above is hardly used at all in rankings. In other words, a PR 3 can easily beat a PR 5 site.

What you do use PR for is an indicator of ‘volume’ of backlinks. Higher PR pages and sites generally have more backlinks. Are they good backlinks? Is this a good place for you to get a link? PR does NOT answer those questions anymore.

Relevance:
Relevance of a page is based on two things. Text on the page, and relevance of sites or pages that link to that page.

Now, lets consider something. I believe Google right now is primarily ‘page’ based and not ’site’ based. So getting links from relevant ontopic pages, on an offtopic website works great right now. Will this continue to work? Ideally I think Google would like to use site specific relevance instead of page specific relevance but they run into problems with ‘general’ sites like news sites and the like that have pages on many topics. The reason this is important is if you develop links from ‘pages’ that are important but are basically fudged on a site that really shouldn’t be linking to you - well, that’ll work great right now. It may or may not work great later.

So for relevance, look at the page and make sure it uses words similiar to what’s on your site. Then check the backlinks of the site and make sure they have backlinks from places that are relevant as well.

Trustrank:
This is another conceptual guideline. It may not be exactly what Google does, but approaching this from the right perspective does work now, worked previously, and I expect it to continue to work.

Trustrank is like pagerank. And it works very similiar to pagerank. Trustrank flows from page to page and site to site via links. Get a log of high trustrank links to your pages, your webpages will get a high trustrank.

There are three differences though between TR and PR. First, we can’t see trustrank (pagerank has plenty of little toolbars we can install in our browser to see the PR of any page).

Secondly, rather than being iterative, TR only flows downhill. It’s been speculated (and speculated correctly IMO) that Google dictated some sites as ‘trusted’ and gave them TR. All trustrank flows down from those sites. We do not know what those initial sites are.

Thirdly, unlike PR, I believe Google uses TR heavily in it’s algorithm. Get a high trustrank, and you’ll rank. How do you get a high trustrank? Get lots of links from sites with high trustrank.

Since we can’t see trustrank, how do we measure it? Well, we can’t. All we can do is assume. But that’s OK - it’s very easy to do a gutcheck of a trusted site. Let’s look at some examples. Goverment of Canada site. Trusted? Of course. Highly trusted? Sure is. A university. Trusted? Of course. Not quite as high a TR as the Government of Canada, but probaby not a slouch either. What about a directory site that links out to anyone and everyone for a $15 fee. Trusted? No, not much at all.

In short, just have a look at the site. If it seems highly trusted, assume it is. If it seems shaky, assume it’s low trustrank.

Age:
It’s been assumed that Google has some sort of aging algorithm in it’s backlink checking. Older links are better. This was done as a spam prevention measure. Most web spammers are not willing to wait 6 months or a year to see if backlinks work. So aging cuts back on that. It also places distance between developing links and their affect on your ranking making it more difficult to tell if a specific link helps your site. Six months from now and your site moves up or down - what caused it? Can’t tell if it’s a link or not - and Google wants that obscurity.

Now that you’ve read all that, here’s how you judge backlinks. You want old, trusted, relevant backlinks. When you’re looking at sites to get backlinks from, check their backlinks. If they have old, trusted, relevant backlinks, then that makes them a good link for you to get. Such a link means you know have trusted relevant backlinks that will eventually become old - and you’ll rank.

Just wanted to post a further example of how to search for old domains.

I was doing some searches similiar to what I mentioned in the previous post. And I noticed that any dead sites that are hosted by Yahoo always show the same landing page (the ‘no page here’ type of page that Yahoo displays by default).

On that page are the words “Why am I seeing this page?” followed by a link that I presume shows you how to reactivate your account.

So I did some searches like (again, using mortgages as an example):
“Why am I seeing this page?” mortgages

And voila! A whole bunch of dead pages hosted by Yahoo on the topic of mortgages. Three pages of them actually. Now it’s just a matter of visiting them and evaluating them (check backlinks, age, ownership, check them in archive.org, and so on).

Maybe that doesn’t get it. But enough searches like that and something will come up. Does Godaddy have a hosting footprint we can look for and search on? Rackspace?

You know you need a domain with lots of old links. You can buy a new domain and build links to it over time, or you can buy an old domain that already has links.

There’s plenty of ways to find old domains and websites to purchase, here’s a couple.

Aside: like most things SEO, we start our search on Google. Spend some time thinking of searches, it’ll pay off.

1) Look for dormant accounts
First, look for dormant accounts. Websites that aren’t being used or on the verge of expiring; you can sometimes make a decent offer and pick up a site that someone’s not using anymore. So how do you find them? Google for terms that you would see on websites that are old, out of date, not being used, or have their accounts suspended.

Keeping to our generic mortgage theme, here’s some examples of searches you can do for sites:
- account suspended mortgage
- under construction mortgage
- (C) 1999 mortgage

and so on. The better you are at finding innovative searches the better you’ll be at finding sites that other’s haven’t picked over.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a high success ratio endeavour. You’ll have to spend some time looking, and a lot of time making offers, only to get declined. It’s work and takes some effort (well, it’s not real work though - this is SEO and it’s not like the rest of the world who actually do have to work for a living while we’re screwing around on the internet). In any regard stick with it, they are out there.

I’ve got a friend who offered to buy an old site. Owner wouldn’t sell. A few months later, the owner’s transmission died and he needed the cash. Site sold!

2) Scrape old directories
Google for directories in your niche. Download a copy of Xenu link sleuth and politely! scrape the old directory. That’ll tell you two things. First, any dead links may be indicative of dropped domains - domains not registered any more but with some good old links. Secondly, it’ll show you sites that have been around for a long time.

3) Connect with the industry
Go looking for hosting companies that specialize in your niche. Chat them up, strike a deal so that they let you know if any of their customers are going to drop their website. Maybe going out of business or whatever. Work out something like a $500 payout for the domain owner, and the hosting company gets $100. Whatever - keep your ear to the ground in the niche.

I do hosting for my niche. And a few years ago (before age was a factor in the algorithm) I bought a domain from a fellow who was retiring, for like $500. That’s about what it was worth at the time since it was listed in the DMOZ directory (DMOZ is a good directory to get a link from if you can). Years later it’s now sitting in reserve, I’m shortly going to turn it into one of my flagship sites. And I wouldn’t sell it for less than $20K.

4) Watch the digitalpoint forums
The sites for sale in digitalpoint are full of crap, low end sites, and fraudulent sellers. But every once in a while - and it’s rare - a great sight comes up that’s underpriced. I’ve seen sites probably worth a grand or two sell for $100. Not often mind you, but when they do they go for the buy it now (BIN) price within minutes. So you have to watch.

In summary, keep your eye out for old domains. They can be an easy way to get a ready to rank site.

OK, first post on how to actually get links. This stuff is very rudimentary. But don’t let that fool you. What I’m about to show you needs to be both the starting point for developing links to your site, and the basis for your link development - the foundation as it were.

These techniques will seem crude and rudimentary. And they’re work to implement. But the work. The difference between many successful SEO campaigns and those that fail is whether or not you do the grunt work to lay the foundation. So don’t say I didn’t warn you - ignore this stuff and you might as well not even bother.

Here’s the dealo. We are going to go looking for links in the following locations:
- sites that rank
- sites that link to sites that rank
- sites that rank on related terms

Now I’m not going to show screenshots as I don’t want some poor soul to get inundated with link requests. But lets use ‘mortgages’ as our target market.

First, go to Google and search on mortgages. There you go - thousands of sites talking about mortgages.
Next, hover over each listing and click your scroll wheel. In firefox this will open up a new tab in the browser. Click, click click on each of the top 10 listings. Go to the second page, click click click. And so on. Do this for the first 100 results.

No browse through each of those sites. Do any of them look like they might give you a link? If so - send them a personalized email. If they look like they won’t give you a link, close the tab and move on. In any regard you’ve just looked at a 100 relevant sites. Maybe you get two or a half a dozen link requests.

Wasn’t that easy? Sure it was. And the difference between those that rank and those that don’t, is that those that rank actually sat down and did this very boring exercise. Repeatedly. Over and over.

But that’s only 100 sites to look at. Let’s find some more. Let’s search on ‘related’ terms. Do the following searches:
- mortgage brokers
- morgages (a typo)
- mortgage rates
- mortgage application
- online mortgages
- mortgage rates online
- mortgage calculators
and so on.

For each of those terms, repeat as above. Open up and visit each of the first 100 results. You will start seeing duplicates which will speed things up a bit. But keep searching - any term you can think of. Let’s say you do 20 terms. You’ve just evaluated 2000 websites and sent out 40 to 100 link requests. Let’s say you get 10 of those back. Booya! 10 links! That’s 10 more than your competitors have.

Sorry, that’s not sexy. But it just plain works.

Now let’s kick it up a notch. Who better to link to us, than sites that link to those sites that are already ranking? Why, nobody of course - that’s who we want to link to us. First we know that links from those sites do make a site rank, and secondly, if they link to our competitors they might also link to us.

So, lets go back to the Google search on ‘mortgages’. Open the first result in a new tab (again using the scroll wheel to open the URL in a new tab). Now click that tab so we’re looking at the site. Let’s see who links to that site.

Right click on your search status plugin. Select ‘Show Backward Links’ > ‘Domain External Only’ > ‘Yahoo’. That will show the first 1000 backlinks to the top ranking website. So we’ve got 1000 websites that link to a mortgage site. Let’s go have a look!

Open each of those sites in a new browser tab. Have a look at the site, and where they link to your competitor. If it looks like they might give you a link, send them an email asking for one politely. Mention that since they’re already linking to your competitor (or ‘I notice you’re linking to mycompetitor.com, I’ve got a similiar site, would you consider linking to me as well please?’) maybe they’d link to you.

Repeat 1000 times.

Now go to the second site in the Google search for mortgages. Open it up in a new browser. Check the backlinks to that site using the searchstatus plugin.

Repeat for the top 50 results for the search term mortgages - i.e. check the backlinks of all the top ranking sites.

Now repeat again for all those related terms.

You’ve just reviewed 50 sites X 1000 backlinks each X say 20 terms. A million sites. So don’t give me any crap about not being able to find people to link to you. Somewhere in those million sites are quite a few who’d be happy to link to you just because you asked nice. Let’s say you send 5 emails out per 100 sites visited. That’s 50,000 emails. (note; these must be personalized emails. Do not automate.). If you get say one in 10, you’ve just developed 5000 backlinks to your site.

Isn’t that some funny math? 5000 backlinks. And no fancy footwork either. Just gruntwork.

I can’t emphasize enough - this is one of the bigger ’secrets’ in the SEO industry. Just do the work. Find relevant websites and ask them nicely for a link. Over and over and over. Boring yes. Tedious yes. Sexy, not so much. Works? Like crazy it does.

If you did nothing else than this you can get enough backlinks in most industries to rank decently. That’s it! Just do the work - that’s what’ll seperate you from everyone else. And the more search terms you can think of - related, and in related industries - the more of a platform you have to find people to link to you.