BackLinks.com leaks user data
I found BackLinks.com a little while ago but haven’t reported on it because it is a blatant disregard to the google terms and services - They Buy and Sell links.
I wouldn’t use their service - you might get some advance in page rank to start, but then be penalised and maybe even banned.
On top of that - you’re personal info could have been leaked to the world. Whoops!
Have a read of this article :
Backlinks.com client’s data leaked
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Google Page Rank Updates - Patience is Required
So you gone to all the hard work of creating a great site with targeted keywords, unique content and even worked on getting some quality backlinks, but still your Google Page Rank hasn’t changed.
Why?
Well the reason for this is that google doesn’t update the published Page Rank (accessible by all the tools) very regularly - In fact only every 2 or 3 months. That’s not to say that the actual page rank (not divulged) is still not used to place your site on the correct page in the search results - I believe it is.
There is a concept called Projected Page Rank, and there is a website that has a tool to attempt to create this. How accurate is it? Well from what I can tell in some cases it can be, in others it’s not.
Here is the site to try out :
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction
Note - for this tools to work you need a minumum of 100 backlinks to start - so not so good for those startup sites.
Patience is required for any backlink tactics - especially to get page rank updates.
My next challenge is to find a tool that tells us what page our site sits on in a Google search. So far I’ve found a few that claim to gather this but none have worked yet. I might even create one myself. Wouldn’t it be nice for Google to give us some easier to read statistics? Google used to (not after December 2006) provide a Google API Key that allowed some more interrogation of your search rankings. The API Key went along with the now obsolete Google Search API.
Check out this site for Page Rankings (minus Google) : http://www.googlerankings.com
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?
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.
Backlink Builder - SEO online free tool to find sites
So you’ve got a keyword that you are targeting, and you know that quality links come from high Page Rank pages and you’ve got some techniques on determining Page Rank for this sites. What other text on these sites would indicate that there is the possibility of getting a backlink from them?
The SEO’s over at WebConfs.com have come up with a great online tool that searches for these terms on pages that are found in keyword search:
- Add link
- Add site
- Add URL
- Add Website
- Submit link
- Submit site
- Submit URL
- Submit Website
- Suggest link
- Suggest site
- Suggest URL
- favorite links
- favorite sites
- favorite websites
- recommended links
- recommended sites
- recommended websites
- Add article
- Submit article
- link exchange
- reciprocal
The Backlink Builder tool is a great way of finding sites to explore for potential backlinks. I would probably avoid the “link exchange” and “reciprocal” ones though.
This is an awesome Backlink Tactic. It’ll still take some time to weed out which sites might actually accept your backlink, but it’s a good technique to weed out the possibilities.
Unfortunately it doesn’t show the Page Rank of each site - so you’ll have to use another tool to get these. Stay tuned for a fantastic tool I’ve found to help in that area.
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.
Why you should avoid Linking buying and Link farms
I’m so amazed at the number of linking buying and links farms out there on the Internet. I suppose it still exists because the attraction of having lots of backlinks combined with the fact that so many people have already done it. Google cottoned onto to these techniques a long time ago and punish your page rank because of it.
Honestly - have you ever gone to one of these pages with lots of links and clicked on a few (wearing the hat of a normal web surfer of course)? I doubt it. Google are constantly changing their algorithms to try and weed out these sorts of tactics and also openly ban link buying and even reciprocal linking. The search engines can also detect the presence of reciprocal links, pages with too many links and common links that appear on every page on your site.
It’s all about authority links. Link farms have a negative authority - Avoid them at all costs as it can undo any good link building you’ve done.
Google also watches frequency of link building. If one day you go from 10 backlinks to 1000 backlinks it’s going to light up a few flags with the google engines and work against you.
Unnatural link profiles glow in the dark when it comes to the search engines. If you have been convinced that buying links are going to help your page rank make sure they are all targeted to your keyword topics are evenly spread across the Internet. Even the location of the links is important - they all need to be on different IP address’s or this will also raise flags.
Quality backlinks are very valuable but it’s easy to undo them with some ugly ones.
If you believe that the links are naturally clicked on and will still bring traffic to your site (and you’re not all that worried about page rank) then go for it but don’t expect to appear high in the list on the search results.
There is still a whole lot more to discuss on this topic and I will uncover the best tactics.
Missing link: results in a Google Search
Do you have a site that you’ve indexed using a sitemap with the Google WebMaster Tools and the Google bots have come and trawled you site but when you put link:yousite.com into Google search you never get back the same amount?
Well don’t fret - Google purposefully only shows about 10% of the link: pages in the search. On top of that they only show Backlinks with a Page Rank of 4 (PR4).
If your site has been trawled by Yahoo - go over there and you’ll see all the backlinks - they don’t hide them.
I’m sure the index that google has of all the backlinks is still used to ultimately create your Page Rank - so don’t feel too disheartened.
I hope this little piece of information takes some of the confusion and stress out of all your hard backlink creation tactics!
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.
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By N2H
