How To Get Links Fast

There are so many link building strategies that it’s almost impossible to number them. I’ve seen posts titled 120 ways to get links but I was never really impressed with them. It was a lot of fluff most of the time, but still with a few jems here and there.

I’ve already delved into some interesting link building strategies in some of my previous posts about funneling page rank. In this post I want to talk about one particular link building strategy. Now I want to make clear first that strategy differs from tactics. Tactics are the how and strategy is the what.

One strategy for getting links is to put something linkable on your site. Then people will link to it and so your link building for you. This could be a crazy picture of something or something very useful like free software or a big list of one thing or another. Something cool, maybe a funny or shocking video of some sort. This is called “link bait” and it works quite well sometimes and not so well other times. It can be hit or miss.

The downside is that this may not help you rank for your keywords. If people are linking to your page they will chose whatever keyword they want as the anchor text. Again, it’s hit or miss.

Not everyone can put something so extremely useful and cool on their site. So what should those people do and what kind of link building strategies are available to them? Needless to say it will be a strategy that is much more proactive. You will have to go out and get these links yourself. The upside to this is you have control. You can decide what you want as anchor text for the link.

Everyone will tell you about the four basic places to find links. They are

1. Article Marketing
2. Bookmarking Sites
3. Directories
4. Blog Comments

But what do you do when all of your competitors are doing the same thing? Reciprocal links and link exchanges are nowhere NEAR as good as they used to be.  What do you do? What if the page you are getting links to is not your homepage? You problably want to know what difference that makes.

For one thing you can’t get blog comments to pages other than your homepage. Your comment will go into the askimet bin and not ever be seen. No link for you! You are supposed to leave your homepage as a link in a blog comment and if you don’t askimet knows. Askimet is very good at fighting spam by the way. That’s old news though.

The problem remains however that you can’t use blog commenting as an effective link building strategy for pages that are not homepages. Same goes with directory links. Most directories only accept and approve links to your homepage. So there are two of the four basic link building strategies that wont work if you are trying to build deep links.

That’s when you’ll find out about:

1. profile links
2. referrer links
3. guestbook links
4. message board links
5. blog farm links
6. pligg sites
7. shout boxes
8. scraper links
9. trackback links
10. google links!

1. Profile Links

Profile links are links you get from creating profiles at different web2.0 properties. I talked about this in my post about funneling juice. Most of the time you can add a link to any page in your ‘about me’ space on your profile.  Most of the time you can only put your url in there and not an anchor. This is one reason to have your keyword in your url.  Even if it’s just in the tag part of the url. It helps.

There are just thousands of these profile pages waiting for you. Check any of the pharma listings ie viagra and whatnot and you’ll see tons of profile pages. These folks actually rank these profile pages but that’s not what we are interested in doing right now. You just want to build a list of places that you could build a profile on. A big list.

These links could be beefed up if you commented (while logged in at each web2.o site) on stories that have a high pr. I usually don’t do that though as it is too much work to do that for every site I own. I usually just get some bookmark links to these profile pages with bookmarking demon and call it a day. It gives them some weight and it’s automatic.

2. Referrer Links

Referrer links come from log pages on other people sites. When you visit a site your visit is recorded in the stats. Those stats are made public in many cases. There are programs that will fake a visit to a site. The victim in this case would then log your site as the place the visitor came from and viola! You have a link.  To make this work you need a big list of target sites that your script will spoof a visit. This is sometimes called referrer spam and is considered the least intrusive form of spam. It involves no hacking or anything illegal. Nothing I write about is illegal.

These links are just plain url links so again, it’s good to have your keywords in the url. They will usually end up in the url if you use keywords in your title. Anyways, seo’s will usually scrape a list of sites on the order of 50,000 or 100,000 sites or so and refer bomb them.  You get a layer of links back at the end of the day. You also get visits from webmasters who check their stats. Maybe if you put something that a webmaster might want to purchase on your page…

3. Guestbook Links

Guestbooks used to be all the rage back in the early days of the internet. Every site had a big message at the top of the page that said, “Please sign my guestbook” and you could go and sign your name and leave a link to your site. People started noticing that there was one particularly popular software that people used in order to have a guestbook on their site.  Consequently the page where you would actually sign the guestbook had tell tale phrases. You could do a search for “please sign my guestbook” and find thousands of results. You could leave your link at every one of them.

That was then this is now. Guestbooks quickly fell out of fashion because they were spammed to death. Not to mention they are pretty weak links. However, there are still people using guestbooks and they are still a valid way of increasing your rankings. Don’t believe me? Go into a very competitive niche like the pharma or credit card niche, analyze a dozen link profiles from top ranking sites and you WILL SEE that guestbook links are a major part of the link profile.

No doubt these are junk links but they add up! Get 100 of these links and your ranking will improve. Don’t take my word for it, go and analyze some of those quick ranking, super competitve pharma results like buy phentermine, buy viagra, buy hoodia diet pills…

4. Message Board Links

Message boards are like guestbooks sort of.  It’s just a place where you can leave an open message for anyone to see. Yes these places exist and they are spammed out. You find spam about porn and gambling and all this other crap but it’s still a place to get a deep link.  There are a variety of footprints that you can use to find message boards. A footprint is something that is always on a certain kind of site. For instance a footprint used to find wordpress blogs is “Powered by Wordpress”

Finding as many footprints as you can is the secret to amassing a ton of targets. That is to say potential places for you to get links.

5. Blog Farm Links

When you run out of internet you need to create more! Real seo’s go through the trouble of creating sites in order to give themselves links. You might go and create 100 blogs just to link to one particular page in order to really get it to rank.  There are a surprising number of places that will let you host a blog for free. You can use the same content for all the blogs if you want. Some people worry about duplicate content. I don’t worry about that really, I just get some bookmarks to the blogs and call it a day. These are actually pretty good links!

Most seo’s have software that will post articles to their blog network. You just load up a list of your blogs and it will post content to them all automatically. Blogs are quickly indexed because google loves blogs.  I like blogfarms quite a bit actually. They give you a better link than guestbooks or message boards or articles for that matter.

6. Pligg Sites

Pligg sites are another type of web2.0 property. These are user  generated content sites. You even get profile pages from pligg sites and can funnel link juice to your profile page from the homepage, as I’ve mentioned before.

But I usually just bookmark my own ’stories’ at these sites. They usually have lousy pagerank and only a few pligg sites are well known. So these are basically like bookmarking sites except they are modeled after digg.com. There are footprints all over pligg sites making them easy to find. Most are dofollow but some are nofollow.

One thing about pligg sites though is that some of them require that a story gets at least two votes before it is allowed out to the main part of the site. So many of your stories will go unnoticed by the search engines unless they get two votes. Some folks have been known to write scripts which will vote on stories in order to get them out on the front page. Cool stuff.

7. Shout Boxes

Shout boxes are kind of like message boards and guestbooks. They are usually on a rolling list on a widget somewhere on the sites. You can leave your url in the shout. Oggix is one of the most popular shout boxes. Go to oggix.com and you’ll see that they provide tag boards, message boards and shout boxes that you can put on your site.

Tons of people have these oggix shout boxes on their sites. Go and use them! The links are crappy but not worse than guestbook links. They work but you need a lot of them.  Hey, you end up with another layer of links. Remember, those deep links are hard to get the normal way.

8. Scraper Links

Scrapers are black hat sites. Black hatters build sites that run automatically. They get their content by scraping popular news aggregates for hot stories. Sometimes they just scrape anything and everything but sometimes they scrape for just certain keywords. For instance, google trends is always being scraped by scraper sites. They just run through the news articles and blog posts listed in google trends and copy the whole thing. It is then reprinted on the scraper blog. So a scraper site is all duplicate content all the time.

There are a number of places that scrapers get their content from and weblogs is one of them. The scrapers then ping their sites and the aggregators scrape them! Then the cirlce repeats itself. Now if you use keywords that you know will be scraped then you can count on being scraped.  But will the scraper site link back to you? Most of them strip out any links in your post. So trying to link to yourself via your own post wont work. However if you use the feed footer plugin you can put linkable tags on the end of your posts in your feed. These links actually stay intact and end up being the links that link back to you from the scraper sites.

This was written abuot ‘famously’ on bluehatseo.com by Eli, the author of the blog and a very clever seo!

This strategy is difficult for the inexperienced seo though. You have to be familiar with what kind of content gets scraped usually and what kind of niches and keywords get scraped. It calls for some experience to really leverage this link building strategy.

9. Trackback Links

Trackbacks happen when you link to a blog from your blog in a post. Your blog will actually alert the other blog that it has been linked to. Most trackbacks appear with an elipses (a …) before the trackback, and they appear in the comment section of a blog. Of course there is software for this too. It will spoof a track back from your site to hundreds of sites or even thousands of sites and you should get a layer of trackback links from it. They are usually nofollow links nowadays. Keep in mind that nofollow links still count in yahoo and other search engines. Even in google they count some. Google does follow nofollow links. Google just doesn’t pass any link juice, but it reads the anchor text!

10.  Google Links

Getting a link from Google is cool right? If you go to google trends and see what the top searches  are you can get a link from google! It’s not that hard. All you have to do is write about whatever is on the trends list. At google trends the top 100 keywords are listed. These keywords are what people are searching for RIGHT NOW. Google needs the info. For instance when Michael Jackson died it was all over google trends. You just copy the keyword from google trends, put it in your title and write a post about it. Make sure you use the keyword over and over again in the post.

Google also lists related searches for each keyword. You have to click on the keyword in the trends list and it will take you to an info page that will show you, among other things, the related searches to that keyword. Put those related search keywords in your tags.

Then bookmark the hell out of the post and you will get links from google trends. Not to mention tons of traffic. Mostly useless traffic but traffic none the less.

If you found this post useful do me a favor and link to it.  I wanna see what happens…link bait style.

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