I spend a lot of time in various forums and it just pisses me off seeing the bad advice being dished out in 99.9% of posts. Every “expert” keeps repeating the same things… build links, do directory submissions, do social bookmarking… it’s all the same old bullshit being repeated over and over, and nobody is testing the effectiveness of anything!
There is no one click, magic bullet, free and easy technique for link building. It will take time, effort and/or money.
Right, so here is my quick guide to effective link building. I deliberated for a long while before deciding to write this post. But then I decided why not.. most people are too stupid or lazy to implement 99% of what I advise and will go back to asking loser questions on public forums, so I’m not giving too much away.
Side note: When building links, forget about Page Rank – imagine that PR doesn’t even exist. Just get all the links that you can. Don’t forget that a page that is PR 0 today might become PR 6 in the near future (and vice versa)
Directory submissions.
Directory submissions are mostly worthless. Anybody can do it for any site and there are people out there who will submit your site to 2000 directories for under $20. If it’s so simple that all you need to do is PayPal a few bucks to somebody in Bangladesh, why should Google or any of the other search engines give any weight to directory links what so ever. Shear numbers here can help a little bit, but it’s really only worth while doing for your piss willy little supporting beer sites.
Reciprocal linking.
I keep reading that link trades don’t work anymore, but I’ve got sites ranking at #1 on Google for some mildly competitive terms using nothing but reciprocal links! Sure, they may not be as effective as they used to be, but they sure help!
Social Bookmarking
A total waste of time. Any asshole can do it and, like directory submissions, you can get somebody in India to add your site to thousands of social book marking sites for just a few bucks. Any SEO benefits are so small that your time will be better spent on just about anything else.
Link Wheels.
See above.
Parasite Hosted Sites.
Still mildly effective, but not as good as it once was. Blogger, Wordpress, Wetpaint, Squidoo and a buch of others will allow you to set up free sites that are effectively subdomains of the hosting site. As such they will leach a little PR and authority from the main site and so building free sites and linking to your other sites will help you, but a site with only links from free, parasite sites will raise a red flag to Google.
To be effective you will need to build hundreds (or thousands) of these sites (and maintain them) and then launder the links through your beer sites.
Trade favors for links
This is super simple and highly effective. You obviously have some sort of online skill set that other people don’t have. Contact other site owners and trade some free work or resources for a link. Use whatever skillz you have got. Design graphics, create content, create videos or flash animations, do some programming, donate some hosting space, do market research, do keyword research, write articles…whatever…
Very few site owners are 100% proficient in every aspect of site creation, maintenance and marketing so if you can offer them something of value, a good backlink in return for your services is a very cheap way for them to get some much needed work done.
Blog Spam
This is also not as effective as it once was and is just downright annoying to most people! There are too many Indian “SEO companies” who will employ a bunch of barely literate retards to post comments on every blog they can find. You can spot them a mile away – they always post shit like “I find your informations very good and I subscribe your blog for more learnings to same” – these are inevitably never authorised or deleted ASAP.
You can get some results from blog commenting, but it will take a lot of time and effort because you will need to comment on thousands of blogs. Read the posts before you comment, and then write short but useful and intelligent comments.
Forum Spam
I HATE these assholes with a passion. I’m looking at you bastards that are polluting places like Digital Point with pointless and inane questions as well as stupid comments and answers. (If you don’t have anything worthwhile or intelligent to say, just STFU!!!)
Some forums pass link juice, some don’t (I haven’t seen anything in my Google account coming from DP so please just stop it – it doesn’t work!)
Participate in forums that are in your niche, and offer real useful advice and comments. Check your Google webmaster console to see which forums are being counted as inbound link and concentrate on those. The direct click traffic that you can get from intelligent forum posts far out weighs any SEO benefits!
Buying links
A lot has been made of the fact that Google hates bought links and will slap you if they catch you. Yes, it’s true if they catch you – so don’t get caught! Don’t use any of the link buying and selling services out there, just approach site owners directly and offer them a few bucks for a link. Be prepared to bargain, barter and beg. You’ll be surprised at what you can get!
Link bait
Still probably the best way to get links organically, but it takes time, effort and imagination. The official line from Google is that you should simply create great content and people will naturally link to you. Yeah right.. when did you last link to a site just because it had good information…people link to stuff that is unique, funny, controversial, unusual, gross etc so develope content in your niche that will attract natural links.
Useful downloads are great link bait. I don’t mean crappy PDFs or white-papers, but things like useful software applications get loads of natural links.
Give Away Free Sites
There are millions of small businesses that don’t have websites, have no real need for a website, but having one would be nice.
I’m talking about local pubs, restaurants, estate agents and other one man or mom and pop businesses. They aren’t going to spend a pile of cash with some development company to create a fancy site for them, so approach a bunch of local businesses around where you live and offer them free websites. Nothing fancy – just a WordPress or Joomla install will be more than adequate for most. You can decide for yourself whether you want them to pay for thier own domain registrations and hosting or if you will provide it for free, but develop nice little sites for them and ask only for link permission in return.
Software and Widgets
If you have the ability, create (or pay somebody to do it for you) things like FaceBook applications, WordPress themes, plugins and widgets. Make them freely available with a small link to your site.
Build your own beer site network
If you own the sites, you control the links. If you have 100 sites each with 10 000 pages indexed, that means you have the power of a million pages worth of links that you can direct anywhere you want!
Most of the above mentioned techniques are only worthwhile for building a little bit of reputation and PR to your beer sites. With enough beer site power you can rule the world!
Every time you post, I make an adjustment in my approach to site building. WP blogs can send links to a list of directories, but I’ve suspected nothing much comes of that. Michael Campbell recently posted an article saying it’s best if the first links to a new site come, not from your submissions, but from other sites (IPs).
What do you think about creating stuff on sites like Zimbio, Squidoo, and HubPages? Same as bookmarking or worthwhile?
The thing about free sites for local businesses is similar to something I’ve been considering (see my link du jour), but I was going to host the sites. For links to be effective, I assume you would have to put their sites on separate servers (IPs). That would mean they wouldn’t be free, unless you put them on a free server.
Looking forward to your beer network!
In all cases it is better if links come from other sites rather than submissions. Sure Zimbio, Squidoo, Blogger etc links are OK, but the fact is that anybody can do it and so they will never be as valuable as links from other sites where somebody else had to decide that your site was worth linking to, and then take the time to actually add that link on your behalf.
The trick is to BE that other person (or to appear to the search engines to be somebody else).
When building free sites for local businesses, I try to convince them that it is better if they pay some or other hosting company for a cheap account, but if they don’t or won’t I’ll happily stick them on a reseller or addon account – maybe even take the time to set up a free hosting account if I think it’s worth the hassel. Self hosted links are still much better than none at all!
To try convince them to go for a cheap self paid option, I tell them that if I take care of the hosting for them I will retain the right to add my own third party ads (Adsense and stuff). Most of the time they don’t care – a 100% free site is all they want and at least I’ll make a couple of extra bucks as well as getting the link juice.
Then throw in a bit of coaching to teach them about promoting the site and building thier own links – before you know it you could have a few solid blogrolls from PR4 or 5 sites!
I see you normally charge $100 for developing WordPress sites. You and I both know how quick and easy it is to set up a WordPress site if they supply the content which you can just cut ant paste into place.
If you do a free site, think of it as spending that $100 on a lifetime long, homepage link on a site that will only grow in authority and PR (especially if you take care of some of the basic submissions and other beginner link building stuff for them) – that’s cheap man