BackLink and PageRank Info Within Searches
In my quest to bring you the best BackLink tactics I must have the best information to rate a backlink. Google Page rank is very important for finding a good possible backlink. I’ve found a couple of tools that automatically link into Google and Yahoo searches to give some very valuable information.
These two free tools are :
They are both Firefox Addins and are definitely worth grabbing. SEO for Firefox is provided by SEOBook and they claim that 130,000 webmasters use this tool. It has many uses but I’m just going to show off a few.
I use both together because they show slightly different views and I find that it’s reassuring that two tools return the same results.
Here is an example of me searching Google for Power Boats:
There is so much information that it would take more than a mere blog post to describe, but the important thing to check out is the value after PR (Page Rank). If the Page Rank is 4 or above then the site is doing great for that keyword search and a backlink from that site will help your Page Rank increase.
SEO Quake is great for single pages that you visit too :
The above image shows SEO Quake inserting a toolbar on top of the page showing lots of relevant SEO info.
There are many tip and tricks in reading and using these values. The purpose of this blog post was to introduce you to these two great tools and then over time I’ll teach you how to be a power user with them.
A teaser though - Wouldn’t it be great to see how your direct competitors have obtained a good Page Rank from their BackLinks?
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Do Follow
NoFollow attribute
If you haven’t learnt by now - Google introduced a tag on links called ‘nofollow’ and got pretty much all of the blog software developers to turn it on for links by default. This stops Google from indexing the backlink and did put a huge dent in the number of spam comments that were being created on blogs. All the social bookmarking and image sharing sites also use the nofollow attribute.
Here is an example of the nofollow attribute in use for this site :
<a href="http://backlinktactics.com" rel="nofollow">Backlink Tactics</a>
It seems that things have quietened down a little bit on the blog comment spam arena - especially because most blogs are comment moderated and have spam detection plugins.
Getting backlinks to your site that are nofollow is still valuable for generating traffic and also for Yahoo searches, but doesn’t help your Google Page Rank. Saying that generic traffic can help boost your visitors and in turn potentially create better organic traffic and valuable backlinks.
Do Follow
“Do Follow” is referring to a site that doesn’t use the nofollow tag. This blog is one. Why have I done this? Well because the value of the links on my site are high (if I end up with a good Page Rank) without the nofollow links then it will drive traffic. How will it drive traffic? Webmasters actively search for Do Follow blogs and there seems to be movements out there promoting them. There are even search engines out there specifically looking for them.
Here are a list of Do Follow Directories:
There are also search engines dedicated to finding Do Follow blogs too :
Remember to check the Page Rank of the site - especially where the comment is going to appear. This could create some very good backlinks if you can find high page rank keyword targeted blogs to comment on.
There is a trade off here though. If too many low page rank sites backlink to your site too quickly then it could negatively affect your page rank.
Low Page Rank Sites
There may be future value in low page rank sites. If you think the site is good it might increase in Page Rank and then your backlink will be worth more to your own Page Rank.
Link to Different Pages on your Site
Don’t keep backlinking to your home page - choose different individual pages on your site and link to those - much better for making more of your site have a good page rank - not just one page.
WordPress Do Follow Plugin
I’ve overwritten the default WordPress nofollow status with a plugin called No Follow Free. It’s worth checking out if you have a Wordpress blog and are interested in generating traffic purely because your blog is giving valuable Google backlink comments.
Edu Backlinks
There are sites out there selling Edu backlinks. Edu backlinks are links to your site from sites that end in .edu - Education / University / College / School websites. I found one selling 5 Edu backlinks for $300 a month (to keep them). Will Edu backlinks help your page rank? Read on…
If you’ve been reading my other posts what we have learnt so far is that backlinks from high page ranking pages with good anchor text embedded into the content on the same topic is the ultimate backlink. It’s natural and google values these type of links.
High page rank occurs from a highly secret calculation but a couple of things we do know is that there a few factors that help greatly. One of these factors is age of the site. Edu websites have typically been around for a long time - the birth of the Internet stemmed from University websites. Another factor is quality content. Edu websites tend to have very informative pages like research papers and published notes. If content like this is valuable to others then it will naturally attract backlinks from other sites. These are the main reasons for edu sites being considered as a good source of backlinks.
Some people assume that these edu sites are more Trusted than other domains. This is probably true - but whether or not this is used as part of your backlink page rank calculation is not known.
If you manage to get a backlink from an edu site whose homepage and majority of pages have a high page rank but your backlink sits on a page with a very low page rank then it’s not going to help your page rank.
In Summary
It’s a myth that any edu backlink will help your page rank. All the other page rank criteria still comes into play. There are many edu site pages that have high page rank and if you can get the right backlink inserted correctly into one of these pages then it will be very valuable to increasing your page rank.
Some Tricks to Finding Edu Backlinks Opportunities
In order to get a Edu backlink you’ll need to find an Edu site that give you an ability to add to the page - in the form of a comment, Trackback (i.e a blog). This page must allow you to enter a website and ideally NOT be a nofollow external link.
Of course you want to find an Edu site that talks about the same content, so replace the word “keyword” below with your keyword and run this search in google :
site:.edu inurl:blog “comment” -”you must be logged in” -”posting closed” -”comment closed” “keyword”
This search looks for the domains that end in .edu, have blog somewhere in the url and have comment, but not those other terms which would mean you can’t comment.
You never know - you might be able to contribute a valuable comment to an edu site and obtain a very valuable backlink.
The important thing to remember is to check the pagerank of the page the comment will end up on. If it’s ranked lower than 4 then it might not be worth the effort.
Using YouTube videos for Backlinks
As you know YouTube is hugely popular and attracts millions of people daily. Just recently YouTube released Wide Screen view and Live videos.
With any popular website someone is always trying to work out a way to get backlinks from it.
If you embed a YouTube video on your site you get a backlink added to the YouTube video. The backlink is a no-follow one so it won’t be indexed (stay tuned for a detailed post on no-follow links). If you’ve targeted the right video some video watchers might check out the backlinks and then visit your site.
A better technique is to create your own video that targets your keyword search goals and in the description of the video put your website address. Make sure you put your keywords everywhere on your video. Of course it is important that you video is interesting and gives value to it’s viewers so that they take interest and might click on your links to see your website.
Google made sure that these tactics won’t improve your Page Rank. Can you imagine the spam it would have created on YouTube if it could?
There are a few products out there that claim they can automated YouTube backlinks - but I’d imagine overall this is going to have a very negative affect on your Page Rankings eventually.
If you’ve had success with this type of linking please leave a comment.
Avoid Paid Links - Google Webmaster Site has a form to report them
I was checking on my Google Sitemap status and at the dashboard page notice a link titled : Report Paid Links
Going to that page I was presented with this form :
This certainly is a big deterrent to buying links - and provides another potential strategy :
You could always help Google and report your competition using Paid Links - therefore lowering their Page Rank as the BackLink would lose Page Rank too.
This is something I’ll explore more in the weeks to come.
Using Google Alerts to know exactly when a new BackLink appears
Here is a very handy hint to be told exactly when a new BackLink is added to Google via email - or even a feed.
- Go to Google Alerts
- Sign in or create a new Google account
- Enter the search term : linkto:http://backlinktactics.com (of course replacing the site with your site)
- Make the type Comprehensive
- Set the Deliver to to Email (or feed if you like)
- Set How Often to “as-it-happens”
All done! Every time a BackLink to your site is created you will receive an email notifying you.
This is a great way of getting instant recognition of your BackLink Tactic working! I received an email within 5 minutes of a friend adding link associated with a post link. Her Page Rank was 3 - so I think that might have helped.
I’m sure you could add multiple Alerts specifying individual pages as well if you are targeting backlinks to particular pages.
Please let me know how this works for you.
Buying Links
It is possible to pay for backlinks. Some sites will charge you $75 for a link on a single page. They could also charge you $100 for links on every page.
In regards to being better favoured with the Search Engines, it is better to have one backlink on a quality page then a link on every single page of the reciprocal website. Having a link on every page will definitely give you more direct traffic, but won’t work well with the search engine ranking.
Remember to make sure this is from relevant sites.
If most of your backlinks are from rented sites (bought links) it would be better to not have site wide links and stick to single page links. Search engines may treat you unfavourably if your back links are not from similar topics.
Did you know that some link sites are known by the search engines to be purely that and a link of one of these sites will have a negative affect on your search ranking. Google calls this :
unnatural link profiles
Another great tip in buying links is to get the anchor text inserted as part of a naturally spoken sentence - in the middle of the paragraph.
An additional technique is to buy a full page - basically one whole page advertisement. This way you can design the semantics, positioning and content. Make it look very natural and very informative.
Be careful how many links are already on the page you are buying a link for. If there are more than 80 links on the page your link is not going to be rated very well.
Positioning of the link on the page is also very important to consider. The algorithms used by the search engines may completely eliminate footer links - especially if the bottom of the page has lots of links. Again another reason to get your link as part of the pure text of the article.
If you do invest on a paid link then you probably want to know how they perform. To track performance - buy one at a time, watch the effect of each single one. If you go gang busters and buy 20 links all at once a few might work well, but you wont know which ones.
Where can I buy these BackLinks?
Here are a few of the larger text link sites that will enable you to buy backlinks. I hope to do some individual reviews of these soon - stay tuned.
Stay tuned, there are going to be a few follow-up posts on this topic. There are various ways to buy links and each one needs it’s own time and effort to evaluate so that the tactics are clear.
LinkBacks - Refback, Pingback, Trackback - What are they?
A LinkBack is a name for a BackLink on a Blog post - and there are 3 types :
- RefBack
- PinkBack
- TrackBack
It’s a little confusing, but I’ll make it clear.
I’m going to start with a PingBack - as it makes the others easier to explain.
PingBack
Pingback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Typically, web publishing software will automatically inform the relevant parties on behalf of the user, allowing for the possibility of automatically creating links to referring documents.
For example, Jack writes an interesting article on her Web log. Sarah then reads this article and comments about it, linking back to Jack’s original post. Using pingback, Sarah’s software can automatically notify Jack that her post has been linked to, and Jack’s software can then include this information on her site.
The web publishing software could be any blog type software such as WordPress, Blogger etc.
Automatic Pingback is where the checking of the link is done automatically. These are less prone to Spam than Trackbacks - as they need to be reciprocal.
Here is a great example of a PingBack - look at the bottom of this page - anchortexts. You can see that this post has a PostBack reference back to this post. It looks like this :
RefBack
When a browser takes you from one site to another it passes the referrer (originating webpage) information. If a site is Refback enabled it’ll record this referrer and link back to the original site. This very similar to PingBack but it doesn’t check if the site actually exists. This can be easily spammed by changing the referrer tag in posts and automating it.
TrackBack
TrackBack is the most commonly used form of LinkBack and is probably the most popular with bloggers - enabled by the blogging publishing software. Trackbacks don’t require that the originating site have a link back to destination site. Trackbacks are like comments with links in them.
TrackBacks are great way of generating BackLinks as you can target relevant content and get a link back to your site. Take care to get those anchortexts right though.
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By N2H
[...] as you can target relevant content and get a link back to your site. Take care to get those anchortexts right [...]