Advanced Forum Link Building

As part of your affiliate link building strategy forums should not be overlooked. They are endless sources of linky goodness waiting to be tapped into.

Why? Well for starters you have the ability to control a large number of factors:

1. The theme of the page you’re getting the links from
2. The number of links you’re attaining
3. The speed at which the links are acquired
4. The anchor text & associated page for the link (i.e. deep pages)

You also have an almost infinite inventory out there (1.8 billion results).

Negative Press & Controversy

Since you have editorial control over forum links many people in the industry regard them to be of little or no value, including Matt Cutts himself:

For some reason, I hate signature links. Hate them.

Whilst I don’t disagree with Matt & understand his reasons for not liking these particular types of links, but Google has decided to stick to  an algorithm that favours “voting” (in the form of links) & whilst that is still the case SEO’s & Online Marketers will continue to do whatever it takes to game the system rank.

This guide will cover all of the techniques surrounding link building with forums, from the very simple to the downright dirty.

Don’t expect to get magical results with just forum links, but if you have a  well rounded & natural link profile forum links do work.

These are legitimate ways to build links, as always please try to keep it relevant & useful, there’s no point spamming your links on thousands of forums because:

1. It won’t look natural to have 90% of your inbound links from forums
2. You might trip some spam filters & could risk a penalty
3. More than likely your posts & links will get deleted = waste of time

So sit back, make a cuppa & enjoy.

Keeping Track of Forums

You’ll want to get an excel spreadsheet to track all the forums you use:

Username: Rotate this on every forum, any good mod might search on Google using your username to see if you’ve been doing the same on other forums. Do a search for username generator if you’re running out of ideas.

Passwords: I use Roboform to fill all the other information when signing up. Except the username.

URL’s: You’ll want to keep a record of your Profile URL & the URL to any threads you post in (we’re going to run a check on which links are still live & for how long).

Finding Forums

Google provides some handy operators for finding forums. You’ll obviously need to find something that relates to the keywords you’re using so replace keyphrase with the keyword you want to search for i.e. affiliate marketing.

inurl:forum keyphrase
intitle:forum keyphrase

Vbulletin – inurl:showthread.php keyphrase
Invision – inurl:index.php?showtopic= keyphrase
PHPBB – inurl:viewtopic.php keyphrase
Simple Machines – inurl:index.php?board= keyphrase
Phorum – inurl:list.php? keyphrase
YABB – inurl:YaBB.pl? keyphrase
MyBB – inurl:forum- keyphrase

You’ll also need to check whether the forum allows dofollow links, there’s plenty of useful firefox extensions but I just use the SEO for Firefox, it highlights links that are nofollow which enables you to identify whether or not the forum is passing link equity.

Links in Forum Signatures

Forum signatures are the bread & butter of this link building exercise, your signature will show on every post you make therefore making it quite a lucrative spot.

Quick Tip – If you’re a member of a forum & have thousands of posts already you can utilise this signature space right away. It’s also an option to PM other members & buy advertising in their signatures (this can be good for targeted traffic also if the forum is on topic with your site).

A typical forum signature should contain descriptive links to deep pages within the site(s) you want to promote. Here’s a good example:

The above example is from a webmaster forum & looks pretty spammy. There’s a few tricks you can use to avoid this:

1. When you sign up to the forum don’t post your signature right away. Join in on the conversation for around 10-20 posts then come back in a few weeks & add your signature then. You’ll draw less attention to yourself this way. With this method you need to be sure that your signature will be added to all your old posts though (some forums disable or don’t have this feature).
2. Sometimes less is more, 1 link is much less noticeable & spammy.
3. If you’re trying to post more than 1 link try to create a sentence: I’m in the market for a new web host at the moment, nothing fancy so PM me if you can recommend any, there’s some decent reviews at this affiliate marketing blog but I just can’t make up my mind!
4. Test what’s working, if you’re having a high removal rate then obviously the way you’re doing things is not optimal.
5. If the forum allows you to style your links you can make them smaller, or even change the colours to make them look less obvious.

Profile Pages

The good thing about profile pages is that there’s less link leakage then in the main threads. Most profile pages allow you to add a link, Often they’ll show your signature too, so make sure you use this space.

Links in Posts

Naturally you can (other than your signature) add keyword rich links in posts. This can be risky, because you’ll always bring attention to yourself by bumping an old post to the top.

A great example of a company that executed this strategy perfectly is our old friends over at Xrumer (which incidentally is a forum spamming software). They simply used their software to sign up to thousands upon thousands of forums then instead of dropping a link back to their own site they asked a very simple question:

Has anyone heard of Xrumer? What is it?

People would then literally reply back in the thread linking to the Xrumer website with an overview of what the software is. Talk about getting other people to do you legwork?

Editing old posts

There is however a sneakier way to drop links in posts & that’s making 10 – 20 posts in the forum (in authoritative threads about your topic) then going back in a few weeks & editing your post to include your links. Some forums disable this feature so it’s work checking to see if you can actually edit posts.

You can do something similar with signatures, participate for a while then go back & add a signature which will then get added to all your posts. Again some forums disable this feature & will only include the signature you have live when you make the post.

Images & Smilies

Often overlooked these are perhaps the easiest ways to drop links in posts. The smiley in particular is very sneaky, 99/100 no-one ever suspects someone hiding a link in a simile

Something like this should work on vbulletin [url=http://www.earnersblog.com/]:)[/url]

Questions

As I mentioned with the Xrumer example above people on forums love to answer questions & help people out. If you can get them to inadvertently link to you at the same time then you’re onto a winner. This technique works much better with brands than generic affiliate websites, but even if you’re asking a questions like:

Do you know any good places where you can watch sky tv on your pc?

Get people to respond then go back in a few weeks & turn the “watch sky tv on your pc” into a nice anchor text link to your affiliate site.

Final Thoughts

All of the above techniques can be a laborious process. There’s plenty of people on known webmaster forums that will do the grunt work for you. The key here is to do little & often, don’t blast 100 links a day because it won’t look natural at all.