If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.

Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.

Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:

Hello,

As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.

If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.

Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.
Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.

Have a good week

Visiting the site in question you’ll notice a few things:

• Decent number of Backlinks
• Minimal Outgoing Links
• Decent Pagerank (3 – 5)

Quite possibly the perfect link exchange? Unfortunately not. Look a bit closer.

The Detail

If you look at the email the URL should have a referral string on it (Something like ?ref= or ?pg=). This either sets a cookie when you click on it or logs your IP (or both) which makes your site “appear in the sidebar”.

Thus very cleverly making you think that the website offering the link exchange does indeed link to you.

There’s a few things you can do here to check:

1. Run the referral link through a HTTP Header Checker to see if it sets a Cookie
2. Look at your Yahoo inbound links, does the site in question appear? (it may be too soon but worth looking)
3. Look at the site through a proxy & remove the ?pg or ?ref from the end of the string (Incase they use IP Tracking & not cookies)
4. Clear your cookies & try the site again without the referral path on the end

Very Sneaky

This unfortunately is a very cunning & sneaky tactic to harvest thousands upon thousands of Recropical links. I would imagine that the strike rate doing this is much much higher than just blasting out link requests to everyone in sight.

Be Careful

If you’re contracting an SEO company & they’re using this tactic I’d be very very careful. I’ve seen a number of players that have been branded as unethical by their whole online community for using such tactics.

[Hat Tip]

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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.

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Welcome to the 8th part of the Earners Blog Link Building Masterclass, this particular technique is great for getting deep links into individual products that you’re selling on shopping or affiliate sites, it’s also great for driving traffic & potential buyers to the products on your site (outside of search engines).

Before I begin, hat tip to Ruck over at Cash Tactics for taking this technique a step further & sending traffic direct to affiliate offers on Kaboodle, it’d be interesting to see some stats on how well this method works for generating affiliate income. However, I always prefer, if possible, sending as much traffic to my own sites.

Why?

Well if they’re not on my site then I’ve got no way of getting them signed up to my product mailing list (which = $$$ down the track).

Kaboodle is more or less a Social shopping website. It allows users (& merchants) to add products via a link on your Browser Toolbar to the sytem, you can also create favourites, lists & wishlists, which are all viewable to the public. You can see what other people are buying & even make friends with people who have similar buying interests.

More & more people are now using Kaboodle to shop & find deals on certain products, & since the content is user generated they can often come across some mighty fine deals (that wouldn’t normally be found on paid shopping comparison websites).

This technique is pretty simple, we’re going to create some lists on Kaboodle relating to some products on one of our Ebay Affiliate Websites. Or if you’re a merchant with physical stock or dropshipping stock you can start by adding products from your Ecommerce Store.

Signup

Signup is fairly easy, make sure & add as many descriptive tags to your user profile as possible. This helps you profile get indexed much quicker & gives it a bit more SEO weight.

Once you’re done grab the “Add to Kaboodle” Bookmark for your Toolbar.

Adding Products

Ok so now that I’m done I’ll add 10-15 products from the DJ Gear site I originally used in my Ebay Website Example. You can see the finished list here at my Kaboodle Studio Equipment Page.

When adding products try to add as many tags as you can to the listing, this gets you heaps more exposure for searches & also gets your product listed on more pages.

I could sit here all night & add hundreds of products, therefore having deep links into individual products on my site. This should really help with trying to rank those products that are buried quite deep in your sites & it should also help you increase rankings for the products you currently rank well for.

Indexing & Ranking

You’ll notice that each product page links back to the original website.

It’s hard to say how well Kaboodle helps with ranking, I’ve certainly seen it help many more of my pages out of the supplemental index & into the main index. So I guess you could say that’s a big help with ranking.

Secondly I’ve also seen the Kaboodle Product pages get indexed in Google in a matter of minutes, which is a strong indicator of an authority site.

Everyone is Happy

You’re getting links & traffic to your site, Kaboodle is growing their product database & growing their search engine traffic by having new ranges of products & product pages constantly.

You only have to look at the Alexa graph to show how much traffic all this user generated content is driving to their site:

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The more Deep Links you can get into your Affiliate Sites the less your sites have to worry about the Link Popularity of the homepage having to carry them & as such you should see a much more natural & broad increase in rankings (over time).

Grazr is a cool little app that allows you to add feeds, read them & share them online. You can create “files” then fill them with URL’s or RSS Feeds. Here’s an example of a file I made dedicated to Earners Blog. I was able to create a list of 30+ Deep Link URL’s into the blog here.

Now if you look at the source code you’ll notice that the URL’s are in a noscript tag. Google still counts links within the noscript tag as real links, so don’t let that put you off.

You can easily create 10-15 on topic files filled with URL’s from your sites that are of a similar theme, then start bookmarking them. Whenever you submit your finished file it seems to appear on the Grazr homepage for a while, this helps with the initial indexing.

Bumpzee is another Social Community that pulls all of your latest posts from your RSS Feed. The magic here is that you can join communities to boost the internal links pointing to the profile & also get your posts across the entire vertical of the network. There’s also nothing stopping you creating your own Niche Communities.

To fully take advantage of this I recommend that you show as many posts as you can in your RSS Feed (You can do this in WordPress in Options > Reading). You can get an idea of how I’ve done this with the Earners Blog Profile.

Mybloglog is another Bumpzee style community website. It also allows you to create a profile that shows the latest posts from your RSS Feed. They limit the number of posts shown on the profile to 5, so it doesn’t really matter how big your Feed is here.

You can also really leverage off the Internal Linkage here. There’s literally thousands of communities & absolutely nothing stopping you from joining every single one of them. It’s fairly easy to nail a PR4/5 Profile page in a short space of time.

You can check out the profile for Earners Blog here.

Rojo is another Blog Reading & Syndication platform much like Grazr. You can simply add a feed in the sidebar & it’ll dedicate a page to that feed.

There’s two main issues with Rojo:

• You need to generate inbound links from external sources to the feed as you can’t harness the power of the community like the previous networks.
• The feeds don’t directly link to your blog you need to follow this technique to add related posts to your feeds.

These issues aside you can still utilise this to grab some serious deeplinks into your blog. You can check out an example for Earners Blog here.

If you enjoy & utilise this Link Building Guide please consider spreading the word & linking to it.

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Note: Flickr now nofollows all external links

Welcome to part 6 in my 2008 link building guide, I’ve got plenty more good techniques to go & this one is one of my favourites. I’m sure you’ve stumbled across Flickr at some point or another. Basically it’s a photo sharing community. You can upload photos, share them, people can comment on them & you can also start groups to collect pictures of certain photo types that you like.

Before I begin, I must stress that Flickr doesn’t really like you doing anything of a “Commercial Nature” & if they consider that you are, your account will be disabled, you can always get some istock promo codes. So before embarking on any of the techniques I do recommend keeping separate accounts for each (that way if you get busted for one, you don’t lose everything).

There’s three ways that we can build links via Flickr:

Upload Photos: Whenever you upload photos you’re able to add a brief description. Say you run a website about ipods, upload a few photos of your ipod & link to your website with the relevant anchor text. I managed to upload pictures of about 60 products I was selling on one of my affiliate websites but then had my account disabled. The key to this technique is to make your photos not appear to be “selling anything.” One thing you could also do is just upload photos as normal then write a long description, linking back to your various sites.

Here’s an example of the above technique:

You’ll notice in the above photo it doesn’t look like I’m trying to sell something, but instead I’m simply referencing some equipment I have in my studio (which happens to link to my own site).

Groups: Creating a group around a particular topic is another good way to snag a few high quality links. Lets say for example I have a site dedicated to credit cards, I could simply create a group that collects pictures of credit cards. You can add links back to your site in the About Group section. The more people you recruit to your groups the more link love that main page is going to get (with all the profiles linking to it).

Comments: This is by far the most lucrative way of getting a LOT of links. Whenever you have a few groups set up try commenting on a photo by hitting the Invite this Photo To link. You’ll see something like this:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Pink Furry Widgets, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

These comments can normally go pretty much undetected, since people use them so much. So simply adapt the phrase to link back to your own sites. Like this:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Pink Furry Widgets, and we’d love to have your photo added my Affiliate Marketing group.

You’ll notice that I’ve added a sneaky link with the Affiliate Marketing anchor tag into the phrase. Very very sneaky sir.

Be careful with this technique, remember to link to deep pages, vary your anchor text & don’t spam! Keep it on topic.

Finally, if you’re looking for the best Flickr photos to comment on then it’s naturally the ones with the most backlinks. I normally use digg to find the most popular flickr photos (if they’ve been dugg chances are they’ll have some decent backlinks too). Here’s the query:

[coolcode]http://www.digg.com/search?s=flickr.com&submit=Search&section=all&type=url&area=promoted&sort=most[/coolcode]

Now start making some money.

Been enjoying this series? Show some love by linking to the Earners Blog 2008 Link Building Guide.

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I’m not entirely sure when I’ll be back to my normal posting schedule (i.e. earnosphere etc), probably whenever I finish this Link Building Guide. That way all the posts are in a complete series.

This technique takes a bit of work (no-one ever said link building was easy), but if you put some real time & effort in here it really help you achieve some superb rankings for your deep pages.

WordPress MU is a multi-user version of WordPress. When installed on your server you can create an unlimited number of blogs or even let public users create blogs. Each blog is hosted on a subdomain (i.e. yourblogname.domain.com).

The beauty of WordPress MU is that thousands of people have installed it on their own server, meaning there’s hundreds of potential places to create blogs on varying C-Class IP addresses. You can create a blog about whatever you want & you can easily create a nice powerful link network without having to do any of your own setup or even have your own server. Pretty sweet.

I’ve seen sites singlehandedly dominate the SERPS for specific keyword phrases using this technique alone. I’m guessing it’s due to a number of factors:

• The links appear naturally over time
• The links are deep within content which also appears to be natural
• The links are coming from multiple sources

A simple query in google allows you to find about 1600+ WordPress MU hosts to exploit set up your own blogs in:

inurl:wp-signup.php “fill out this one step form and you”

Now all you need to do is create 25 blogs (I recommend checking out Roboform to autofill the forms if you’re doing this manually, I also use this program to save time with Directory Submissions & Forum Signups.) or more & start populating them with content. This can be achieved with a piece of news from Google News or a Press Release (as these are the types of content that’s syndicated the most).

Interlink the blogs together & use some of the 4 previous techniques I mentioned to get them indexed & spidered.

Now you can start using these blogs to Deeplink into your affiliate websites.

But what if I was to tell you that there’s a way to automate this entire process?

A way for you to automatically:

• Create the blogs
• Post the Content
• Interlink the Blogs
• Insert keywords of your specified anchor text into the articles
• Socially bookmark each individual post
• Track if any blogs/posts have been deleted
• And much more…..

Stay tuned, all will be revealed very soon. If you’re not signed up to my mailing list I suggest that you sign up, as those readers will get first preference.

This post is part of the Mass Link Building 2008 Series.

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This is part 3 in my Link Building Guide for Affiliate Websites. I’ve been using Oggix for a while now with reasonable success for highly targeted keywords & deep pages within my affiliate sites. This particular technique outlines two ways you can use Oggix to build links to your sites.

The Shoutbox

Oggix is a rather popular shoutbox system that users can put on their site & guests can leave messages (and & link ). To find out sites or blogs that are using the shoutbox you simply have to use this query on google. You can see I’ve used the query to find over 1600 pages to target related to SEO.

The main downside to this technique is that if you use it on popular sites with many shouts your link will scroll off fairly quickly, or it won’t be permanent. The fun part of this technique is finding dormant blogs that will allow you link to stick. I’ve found hundreds so I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it fairly easy. The shoutboxes are usually sitewide, which is an added bonus, however they’re contained within an Iframe, (this doesn’t mean we still can’t get a link out of it).

Simply view the source of the code & grab the URL that the Iframe is loading, i.e.: http://server3.oggix.biz/shout/show/?oggixid=21399&type=1&smileys=1

Load this up with your links & fire it into your Social Network Link Farm that I spoke about earlier.

A word of warning if you’re planning on going hard with this technique is to mix up your anchor text. For example if you’re targeting the same page about Link Building for example, don’t add 250 links with the same anchor text, mix it up a little:

1. Link Building in Melbourne
2. Melbourne Link Building
3. One Way Link Building
4. Best Link Building
5. Cheap Link Building Melbourne

Not only will you increase your long tail, but you’ll be less likely to trip any nasty spam filters.

Oggix Free ADs

If the first technique wasn’t enough to wet your appetite then this will. Oggix also has an additional section to their site that’s designed in the style of a blog. However all the content is user generated in the form of user submitted links.

So here’s a quick & easy way for you to get a permanent link on a fairly strong PR4 site. Not only that, you can resubmit every 10 mins & include links to deep pages within your site.

These ads.oggix.com posts seem to get indexed fairly quickly (within 24 hours) which implies to me that the site passes just a hint of authority.

If you like these sorts of link building techniques I’ve got a heap more on the way so stay tuned

This post is part of the SEO Link Building 2008 Series.

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Lets kick off the new year with a little technique that I’ve been utilising quite a bit lately.

This isn’t really rocketscience but this guide is all about making you think for yourself. It takes a special kind of person to think of ways to use websites “outside the box.” Not only to their own advantage, but to the advantage of the site owner. Just like we are doing here.

The theory behind this one is simple, Aboutus is a Wiki like project that generates an about page for any website on the internet. Give it a try, put your site URL into the ‘find bar’ & watch your own page generate itself. Quite ingenious.

Anyway, the basic page contains very little information. It pulls your Whois info, related domains (quite clever for some competitive tricks ) & also gives a quick excerpt of the on page text.

Simply make the page say more about your site, show people your best posts, your best categories & whatever else you feel like. In turn you’ll have some nice one way backlinks to your site from a trusted resource. Now all you need to do is Socially Bump it & get the page indexed.

If you want to check out an example of what you can do check out the Earners Blog Aboutus Page.

But lets say I took things a step further & referenced this post on TNX.net on their Aboutus.org page? I think you get the idea. Remember, this is all about making the service & pages useful for others. Spam pages & you’ll get deleted, then probably ruin it for the rest of us.

This post is part of the Natural Link Building 2008 Series.

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This technique is an old favourite of mine. Don’t be fooled though, you need to put some dedication & keep solid records of everything here. Otherwise you’ll end up getting lost.

Technique 2 – Social Profile Bumping

To do this properly you’ll either need a copy of Excel or Notepad. Or whatever notekeeping program you like to use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep a record of what we’re doing here.

Most Social Sites, Forums & Bookmarking Websites give you a public profile. In your profile it’ll either list your Homepage or a list of your recently bookmarked sites. The aim of this technique is to build up 100+ profiles & interlink them with one another, thus creating a network of 100 sites that we can easily utilise to link to our Affiliate Websites which whatever Anchor Text we like.

Eventually this will build up the backlink for each individual profile & give them decent authority & link influence. Given that these profiles can have upwards of 100 links pointing to each (including internal links too) they can pass a good bit of weight in the engines. Interlinking the profiles will also help each stick better in the search engines, which, in turn will keep your backlinks pumping, instead of the page going supplemental or not even getting indexed in the first place.

Once you have this network built up you can now use each profile to help rank new projects or throw some solid links at existing sites. Pretty simple really.

To those of you that are worried about quality over quantity imo & Matt Cutts recently said it himself:

A Link is a Link, no matter where it comes from.

So, let’s get some links?

Laying out your Excel Spreadsheet

You need to make a record of the profile page for each network that you sign up to. It’s worth doing this in something like Excel. I have tabs for each type of linking network I’m highlighting in these guides. You’d put these under the “Social Bookmarking” Tab.

Below I’ve highlighted a few examples of the pages we’ll be bookmarking.

• Digg: digg.com/users/username
• Flickr flickr.com/photos/username
• Myspace: myspace.com/username
• Sphinn: sphinn.com/user/view/profile/username

These are the URL’s you want to be keeping track of, because these are the URL’s you’re going to be bookmarking/building links to. You can include these all in a single column.

Other variables you may want to consider keeping a record of:

• Keeping track of the usernames & passwords for each of the sites (I often sign up to all the sites with the same login & password details to avoid this, but you can mix it up if you want).
• Keeping track of whether the page is indexed in Google.
• Which sites/pages you’ve submitted to each site & anchor text you’ve used.

List of 20 Sites to get Started

Below is a list of 20 sites that you can use to start creating your network. They’re all dofollow & I’ve highlighed which pages you should be bookmarking once you’ve created a profile.

• Any Vbulletin Forum: forumname.com/member.php?u=userid
  
• Technorati.com: technorati.com/people/technorati/username
• Searchles.com: searchles.com/people/show/username
• Digg.com: digg.com/users/username
• Backflip.com: backflip.com/members/username/
• Bibsonomy.org: bibsonomy.org/user/username
• Faves.com: faves.com/users/username
• Wink.com: wink.com/p/username
• Simpy.com: simpy.com/user/username/links
• Markaboo.com: .markaboo.com/people/username
• Rawsugar.com: rawsugar.com/user_account/user_profile?username=username
• ma.gnolia.com: ma.gnolia.com/people/username
• Furl.net: furl.net/member/username
• Propeller.com: propeller.com/member/username/
• Indianpad.com: indianpad.com/user/username/bookmarks
• Care2.com: care2.com/news/member/userid
• Plugim.com: plugim.com/user/username/history/
• Blogmarks.net: blogmarks.net/user/username
• Spotback.com: spotback.com/users/leosatter
• Socialogs.com: socialogs.com/profile.php?id=userid&cmd=submitted

A few important things to remember is that you can get banned from these networks for spamming, so be careful what types of sites you link to & which pages.

You can check to see if the page is in the main index of Google by pasting the URL (without the http://) into the search box i.e. www.propeller.com/member/username/

You can check to see how many inbound links the profile page has with the SEO for Firefox Tool I spoke about in my last post that technique always helps me find new Social Sites to add to my list as well.

Always try to mix up your Anchor Text & which pages you’re linking to on your sites. Don’t just point all your links at the homepage, it’s unnatural. Also don’t point 100 links to your sites at once.

Remember that once you’ve created all your accounts you need to start bookmarking them or submitting them. This can mean that you’re submitting 50+ profiles at a time into each website (which can get quite boring). From personal experience I try not to submit too many at once otherwise you risk detection.

Happy bumping!

This post is part of the One Way Link Building 2008 Series.

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• 2009 Link Building Guide
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• Link Building Guide Part 4 – Oggix.com
• Link Building Guide Part 7 – Social Network Deep Link & RSS Syndication

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Over the coming weeks I’m going to create a series of posts that outlines varying ways of generating & getting links to your sites. You may want to read a few of my other posts on this topic before this one to get some background:

• Ultimate Affiliate Link Building Guide
• Tips for beating Google’s Sandbox
• Link Building Tips

Now that you’ve digested those posts lets start with the first technique.

Technique 1 – Yahoo Site Explorer & Yahoo Search

To use this technique you’ll need Firefox & the SEO for Firefox Tool.

Yahoo updates their backlinks much more frequently than Google (pretty much daily). It’s the most up to date information you can get on a sites backlink profile.

Therefore the basic theory behind this technique is that it allows us to see where other sites are getting their links from & thus why they are ranking higher than we are. Thus allowing us to get those links too & then some.

This is technique is useful for three reasons:

• Enables us to see how difficult it is to outrank a particular website
• Opens the doors to new methods of link promotion we might not have thought of
• Allows us to scan the backlink profile of whichever sites we want (this is important)

With the SEO for firefox tool there’s 2 main settings that we’re interested in. The Y! Links & Y! Page Links.

• Y! Links: This shows the total inbound links to the entire site
• Y! Page Links: This shows the total inbound links to a specific page

I mentioned this technique a few weeks ago in the Al Gore Hacked Post. It’s useful to see what Blackhat’s are doing to get links & also what your competitors are doing that’s different from your Link Building Campaign.

I’ll let you in on a secret, this technique is pretty much how I stumble upon any other techniques I’ll be outlining later in this guide. With careful analysis you’ll be able to find plenty of nice places to drop links.

This post is part of the Link Building 2008 Series.

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• Digg’s HD-DVD Revolt, the best Linkbait Ever?

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We all know that Duplicate content is a bad thing, however I’ve never seen any negative effects from Scraper blogs republishing my original content. I’d normally get about 2-3 blogs trackbacking me everyday republishing my articles.

If you use WordPress it’s very easy to take full advantage of these sites linking to you, all you need to do is create links back to your content within your feed.

What you’ll need for this:

• Cave Monkey’s Full Text Feed Plugin
• Solo Technologies Add Related Posts to your Feed Plugin

These plugins simply show your entire post in your feed & also add some related posts in your feed only (which will also increase the amount of people in your feed reading more than 1 post).
Now, everytime anyone scrapes your blog via your RSS feed & republishes it they’ll be deep linking to 5 or more of your existing posts. Bingo.

I always make sure to try & deep link to old posts from within the body text of my posts using varying Anchor Text too.

Never underestimate the power of good internal linking & natural anchor text.

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• Link Building Guide Part 7 – Social Network Deep Link & RSS Syndication
• Link Building Guide Part 4 – Oggix.com
• Link Building Guide Part 5 – WordPress MU

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We all know that the Text Link market is now a volatile place & in order to survive you need to evolve. So what have TNX done differently to the other networks out there?

Stealth

• Is the on site code detectable? In that particular example, a simple Google phrase gives away thousands of publishers. Whilst this is only an example of the code giving errors, TNX have made their code much more versatile, in that is doesn’t give incriminating errors but rather a 404 instead.
• You can’t choose which advertisers to buy directly from, instead you pick a certain criteria of what you want (more on this later) & tnx fulfill the order for you. This increases the security for publishers.
• The links placed on publisher’s websites aren’t sitewide, therefore there’s less chance of tripping spam filters.
• The links can be contained within a paragraph of text, which again draws less attention to them.

Value

• The system offers value for publishers, in that you’re not selling sitewide links. Instead you’re selling links on individual pages of your site. This increases the overall “combined link value” of your site. (i.e. would you rather sell 1 sitewide link for $100 or 100 links on individual pages for $250?).
• TNX will only take 12.5% of the total commission, leaving you earning 87.5%.
• In turn this value is also passed onto advertisers, you can now purchase more links from varied sources (i.e. would you rather spending $100 on 1 sitewide link or $100 on 50 links on individual pages across 50 sites?).

Speed

• The speed with which the system works allows you to buy large amounts of links very quickly. You specify your link criteria & the system fulfils your order (within a few days).

Since there’s been a bit of buzz about the service I decided to give you guys a rundown of what I think from two perspectives. The advertiser & the publisher.

In theory, advertisers are signing up to services like this to make money just as much as the publishers are. Except, the advertisers are wanting to increase rankings to sell a service, whereas perhaps the publishers don’t have a service to sell & instead sell the ad space on their websites / blogs.

TNX for Advertisers

I joined TNX about 3 weeks ago & created a few campaigns for some affiliate sites that I just started recently. I deposited $100 via paypal & received around 134,000 tnx points.

I’m currently running about 16 PR2+ links which costs roughly about 14,800 points per month (about $10). I could have chosen a cheap option & went for PR0 pages, but I decided to go with domains that had a high overall backlink count (hence the increase in cost). This is one of the features I like about tnx, things revolve less around Pagerank (which many other link brokers base their system on) & more towards link equity / volume.

Pricing revolves around the amount of points that you have to spend. TNX give a rough indication on the monthly price for an individual link (& when I say rough there’s a disclaimer that points out The Maximum price can be 20 times higher):

• PR0: $0.00126
• PR1: $0.063
• PR2: $0.126
• PR3: $0.252
• PR4: $0.63
• PR5: $1.26
• PR6: $3.15
• PR7: $6.30

The price seems to increase depending on the overall number of incoming links to the domain. So a PR7 link from a domain that only has 500 total incoming links will be cheaper than a PR7 link to a domain with over 250,000 total incoming links.

Now the fun part starts, you need to decide on the anchor text to use for your links. I recommend the Wordtracker Keyword Researcher for this (no point going for words that won’t get you any traffic), also make sure you read my article on avoiding Google’s Aging Filter (remember just because you can buy hundreds of PR0 links cheap, doesn’t mean you should. Take things slow & steady). Think of getting links as a exponential curve, the older your site gets the more you can acquire without looking suspicious.

Overall TNX is a pretty good deal for Advertisers, it caters easily for those on a small budget as well as those with a much larger budget. Enabling both to cover a wider range of keywords than previously possible (with other brokers). The downside to the system is that you really have no control over which sites your links are put on; other than selecting your criteria. I did have a few links appear on a crack website & a warez forum but you are able to “block” those sites before the links go live. I also noticed that you get charged for the links before they’re even confirmed as active by the TNX spiders. Personally I don’t think an advertiser should be charged until the link is confirmed as active, otherwise you run into potential problems of charging people for something they’re not getting.

If you’re interested in giving their system a whirl you can grab 5000 (PR0) free text link ads courtesy of TNX. Remember though, don’t go overboard.

TNX for Publishers

Publishers are what makes the system work, after all if there are none then there’s no link real estate to occupy. Therefore TNX really needed to come up with a system that’d work well for publishers across a number of verticals.

As I mentioned before, perhaps the biggest selling factor is that you can sell up to 4 links on individual pages on your website. I did a quick calculation using the TNX Income Calculator. For Earners Blog it worked out to be around $250 a month. Mainly due to the fact that Google slapped down on my Pagerank.

For that particular reason, the publisher program wouldn’t be anywhere near as profitable for me as direct ad sales or even affiliate sales for a month.

Sites that I could see it working well for though are ones with a huge number of pages:

• Forums
• Comparison Shopping Websites
• Sites with user generated content

I’d also like to see them move away from “Pagerank” & give pages a value based on the number of inbound links they have. For example, my page about Digg Power Users has around 179 inbound links & is a Page Rank 2. A link on this page is going to be much more valuable than say my post about Gaming Digg, which only has 31 inbound links but is also a Page Rank 2.

TNX also offers a referral / affiliate program to all members. You can earn 13.3% of all TNX points that are generated by any publishers you refer & 5% of any points generated by advertisers you refer. You can use the points to buy links, or you can cash them out. Not as initially appealing; as the $25 per member TLA offers, but could work out better in the long run (i.e. free advertising for you).

Tips to avoid your site getting filtered

Since TNX allows you to buy a large amount of links at once, I recommend being careful. Otherwise you risk your site getting penalised for a short/medium term for specific keywords, follow these tips & you should be fine:

• Try to make it look natural, these links work best if you have a natural looking link profile, so don’t overboard on paid links.
• If you have a new site try to limit yourself to 5 new links per week for the first month.
• Mix up the anchor text as much as possible, don’t buy 100 links with an “affiliate marketing” anchor text.
• Link to deep pages within your site, don’t point all the links to your homepage.
• Don’t label any links on your site as Sponsored Links, Sponsors or Partners.

Recommendations

There’s a few things I’d like to see TNX implement to make the system a little better:

1. The ability to filter out WAREZ related sites.
2. Not charging Advertisers until the links go live.
3. Time Delay on link fulfillment (i.e. the ability to set a time delay for links to go live).
4. Email alerts.

Final Thoughts

TNX is still young, so it’s only fair to expect some growing pains. However they offer a very viable solution to all Organic based Affiliate Marketers. The ability to point 30-50 links to your site over a period of time for a mere $10/month is quite nice. Remember, you have to make investments to get returns in this game. If a $10/month investment means an extra $1,000/year from 1 site. Then it’s a small price to pay.

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What’s the main two things that we want when link building?

Relevance & Link Popularity

Right, stay with me. Where’s the best place to find pages that are relevant to our sites that we KNOW have a high link popularity? Social Networks.

For example, visit Digg & fire in a search for what you want (given that the Digg Search engine isn’t all that good you should still see plenty of popular stories) then sort them by the most diggs.

Now you’ve got a page filled with stories that have been made popular based on the topic you’re looking for & chances are they’ll all have hundreds (if not thousands) of inbound links to that particular page alone. Making them very very juicy.

I used to use these pages to get links into deeper pages of my affiliate sites, but since the new comments system was introduced the lower ranking comments are hidden by AJAX (which the spiders can’t trigger).

So instead we have to go after the stories themselves. We’re merely looking for a link within the body text of the story. This is simple, if you follow the steps in my previous stealth linking post. These links pass heaps of weight & authority. They’re also almost impossible to detect.

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• Link Building Guide Part 3 – Aboutus.org

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Stealth Link Building – Part 2

In my previous post on Stealth Link Building I talked about why building links “under the radar” is good. I also talked about some ways to find relavant sites to get in contact with (Another great tool for this is Comment Hut), or simply use the SEO For Firefox tool to analyse the backlinks of your main competitiors (In Yahoo). After all, if they’re linking to them, they’re more likely to link to you….right?

Now that you’ve hand picked around 50-100 sites that you’re effectively going to target, you need to formulate some ideas to get a link on their site exactly where you want it. This is somewhat easier than it sounds, here’s a few methods:

The Recommendation Method

This is the stealthiest method of the lot. Here, we’re trying to appear to be a 3rd Party recommending your own website to an unsuspecting webmaster. Julian over at Dfinitive used this technique well to help a recent client get to #1 in Google for a particular set of keywords.

Here’s a sample of the email sent to the “targets”:

Hi XXXX,

I hope you are well.

I stumbled upon your site today and would like to say that I found the link section very helpful.

I do have a suggestion for your link section. Aerobed probably make the best inflatable beds around. I brought one recently and can’t believe how good they are. Airbeds are so much better than used to be, plus it inflates in about 2 mins, with no blowing.

The site is www.xxxx.com.au check it out.

Thank you for your time,

Your Name.

I’d recommend using this email as a brief template for your own, however make sure to make the website sound as appealing as possible.

Naturally you also don’t want to be sending the email from an address that is linked to the domain or using an username that is linked to the name of the domain either. I recommend using a Gmail Email address to send these queries, this makes it look more natural.

It’s possible to get a decent strikerate with this technique, after all it’s a pure numbers game so don’t hold back.

The Quiet Exchange Method

This particular method is a little more tactful. Use it when you think the webmaster will need a little more “persuasion” to link to you.

We all know that unless you have something good to offer, chances are if the webmaster is in any way savvy they’ll not even bother looking through your email properly. This is why you have to be able to offer them something in exchange for your link.

The best way to initiate this is to go for the 3 way link. I.e. You link to me & I’ll link to you from one of my 3rd Party Websites. Problem with this is that the 3rd Party Website is always going to be of lower quality to your main site. In many of my niches I keep a number of quality 3rd party linking sites (or directories) that have strong authority in the search engines. Older domains are usually perfect for this so check out my previous article on Aged Domains. Being able to offer a free directory listing for a link usually works best in these instances.

I’ve seen a LOT of popular dating websites use this method very effectively. It won’t work on me though, why? Check out an example of what one of the Third Party Domain links pages look like:

I’d rather not have my link on a page like this. I always check for two things:

Is the page Indexed?

How many Backlinks does the page have? (Including Ratio of Outgoing Links to Incoming)

If you’re not happy with your link being on a page like the above then CHOOSE the page you’d like before you initiate the request. Make sure to say you feel like this is the “most relevant page.” Whilst you really mean, this is the page with the most backlinks. Muhahaha.

Pay Your Way

Can’t get the link on the page you WANT? Usually a little monetary persuasion goes along way. Offer a price for the link (make sure it’s permanent) & you’re much more likely to get what you want. After all, you could spend $70/month for a link on somewhere like Textlinkads or perhaps with a little digging yourself could net 7 HIGHLY RELEVANT permanent links for $10 each.

Things to avoid:

The key is stealth, try to avoid getting links in sections labelled:

1. Sponsored Links
2. Partners
3. Advertising
4. Paid Advertising
5. Sponsors
6. Links

If you’re paying for the link specify where you want it. In the content as a “normal link” is by far the most effective & undetectable method.

Stay tuned for Part 3

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Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

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• Stealth Link Building – Part 3 – Social Link Scouting
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• Link Building Guide Part 4 – Oggix.com

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When working with a website quite frankly nothing works better & is more stable than some good old fashioned link building with that personal touch. But now that Search Engines are becoming smarter at “discounting obvious links” we need to make sure that are links are getting the most value whilst still being undetectable.

Why is Stealth Link Building good?

1. Well firstly you can choose which pages your link will appear on
2. You can choose the anchor text
3. You can make an informed decision about how much link weight or authority the site will pass
4. The links are less noticable & less likely to be discounted

The days of getting links on “link pages” are falling behind us, appearing natural in the eyes of the search engines is the way forward. Besides, why would you want a link on a “link page” that has no incoming authority or backlinks when you could find the page within a website with the highest authority or most relevance to your website & drop the webmaster an email?

How can I practice Stealth Link Building?

The process of obtaining solid links that will really count for something isn’t something that will happen overnight. It will take time, effort & dedication. But, with most things you’ll get better & better at it as time goes on.

First of all you need to create a shortlist of websites within your niche that you’d like a link from. I personally don’t go after the sites that are too SEO’d, but rather aim for a website that has a more natural feel to it (from an SEO standpoint). Check to see which sites already rank well for the terms you want to target & add them to the shortlist.

Once you’ve got a list of about 50 websites, you’ve now got to see which pages on the site are most relevant to your website or the anchor text you want to use. You can check this out using a simple Google query:

site:thewebsite.com “anchor text”

This will bring up any pages within the website that contain your anchor text.

Secondly you want to see which pages within the site are regarded as “authority pages.” You can check this in 3 different ways:

Using the SEO for Firefox tool to check how many page links, .edu links & .gov links a page has.

Use the Webuildpages Strongest Subpage Tool to find authority pages on a website. This can sometimes be innaccurate though for example if you query squidoo.com you’ll notice a lot of spam backlinks which have been banned in Google but still appear in Yahoo.

The final way is by using a tool by Fromshawn, it’s an Authority Site Finder Tool. Best of all it’s free.

Stay tuned for more on Stealth Link Building

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1. The Quality of Affiliate Websites
2. Increased PPC Competition & Prices

Nowadays setting up disposable affiliate websites is not as easy as it once was. Not only that, Affiliate Marketers are now faced with a new challenge:

How the hell do you drive natural links to a website that’s clearly just promoting affiliate products?

I’m going to address some of the techiques I use & some of the techniques I’ve seen on other blogs to overcome this issue. This should hopefully help you dominate your niche & take your affiliate websites to the next level. Leaving your competitiors to sit back & cry.

1. Creating a Blog on the Affiliate Site

The nature of blogs & the information they provide make them very linkable. Writing indepth posts about a particular topic or subject can attract natural links to your blog, which you can then filter into your Affiliate Product pages. Blogs are also received much better on Social Networking sites.

Pros: Effective | Allows you to direct targeted internal links | Keeps content fresh

Cons: Time Consuming | Lack of knowledge in the area to write fresh articles

2. Creating the Affiliate Site as a Blog

Many affiliates have been cutting out the middleman & using blog platforms such as WordPress right from the getgo. This allows them to integrate articles in with affiliate reviews to make the whole site look much more natural. I’ve found this particular technique to be quite successful. This will attract links to particular posts which can allow you to deep link with relevant anchor text into product reviews.

Pros: Allows more flexibility with content | Affiliate links can be hidden seductively within posts | Easier to do well on social networks since your site doesn’t look like spam

Cons: Time consuming | Easy to lose interest if you’re not converting | If you build up a readership you feel like you need to blog often

3. Squidoo

Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Simply create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & also join as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together using a links plexo & choose the anchor text you want to rank for. Now also link back to your affiliate website with the anchor text you want to rank for from each lens. Bookmark the lens using Onlywire. Wash rinse & repeat.

Pros: Squidoo links pass a good amount of authority | Squidoo lenses rank very well naturally so this can provide extra exposure & inbound links to the lens

Cons: No cons other than time

4. Dominate the SERPS

Are you wanting to rank for a particular term? Then dominate that term by flooding it with as many of your own targeted pages as you can. All linking back to your original Affiliate Site.

I.e.

http://www.myspace.com/earnersblog/ & http://www.squidoo.com/earnersblog/

Register a page on:

1. Squidoo
2. Googlepages
3. Blogspot
4. Myspace
5. WordPress
6. Typepad
7. Spaces.Live.com
8. Feedburner

Register User Profiles on:

1. Digg
2. Mybloglog
3. Bumpzee
4. SEO Moz
5. Stumbleupon
6. Last.fm

Use all these relevant pages to link back to your own site, which will help increase your serps ranking for that targeted keyword. If these pages rank well & dominate the serps it will also increase your overall market share & push out competitors, which is always a good thing

Pros: Ability to dominate for a particular keyword | Can leverage off other sites link popularity

Cons: Time consuming | May take time to get all the profile pages indexed

5. Forums

Register on related (& unrelated if you wish) forums. Set your signature with the anchor text you want to rank for. Go back to some of the older posts with pagerank & authority (I like to use the Strongest Subpages Tool to find authoritative pages).

If you’re feeling particularly inventive, make a load of posts then come back in 3-4 weeks, edit the post & insert your links. This will avoid detection by the mods & admins.

Also search for forums that have VBSEO enabled. You can find heaps by using this query. VBSEO rewrites user profiles thus helping that page rank better for the chosen keyword.

Pros: Thousands upon thousands of forums to utilise

Cons: Profile may get banned for spamming if you’re not making relevant posts | Forums may require a certain number of posts to use signatures

6. RSS Feeds

Using RSS & XML feeds are great ways to get inbound links quickly, check out these posts:

1. Using RSS Feeds for Backlinks
2. Automated XML Backlinks

Check out the RSS top 55 for more places to grab RSS Links from.

Pros: Can accumulate a lot of backlinks in a short period of time

Cons: Scraper backlinks are spammy & may provide no overall value

7. Blog Commenting

Finding blogs that don’t have the nofollow enabled is a great way to spend a day. Set up an excel spreadsheet, hell even write a script to do it for you. There’s a dofollow plugin now that will remove the nofollow tag on WordPress. Start your research there, you’ll soon find lots of blogs that are Dofollowing (i.e. Easy Pickings).

Pros: Quick easy links

Cons: May get deleted if your anchor text is too spammy | Quite a bit of research involved

8. Sponsoring themes & templates

I mentioned this before in my sponsoring wordpress themes post. There hundreds of different templates you can sponsor, it doesn’t have to be just wordpress.

Think Joomla, Movable Type, Vbulletin, Invision Power Board, PHPBB etc.

Pros: Cost Effective | Can gain lots of links very quickly

Cons: Can’t control who is linking to you | Many sitewide links could trip spam filters

9. Link Bait & 301 Redirect

This is perhaps one of my favourite techniques at the moment. Create a blog purely for linkbait purposes & write articles for Digg, Netscape, Reddit & Stumbleupon. Once you’ve gathered around 1,500 links 301 redirect the pages & blog to your existing Affiliate Marketing websites to boost their authority.

Pros: Good way to fight supplemental results | Possible to amass a large amount of links organically & very quickly

Cons: Links may not be relevant to your niche & may not help your affiliate pages rank any better (think a bit about this one ) | Writing a popular story can take time & a lot of perseveration.

10. Link Feeder Sites

This again is something that Eli touched on a while ago in his post about Link Laundering. Basically you’re using existing sites that requires registration to build targeted backlinks to your Affiliate Sites. These can be software download sites or even reciprocal directories. If you set up a nice network you can instantly get about 200-300 links per day to sites or pages that you specify with the anchor text that you specify. Check Eli’s post out for more detailed information.

Pros: Can build targeted links very quickly | Can choose the anchor text

Cons: No control over the quality of sites the links go on | Too many links with the same anchor text could trip the spam filters, so rotation is necessary.

So there you have it, a breakdown of some of the top methods you can use to really boost your affiliate websites up in the serps & start capatilising on the traffic you’re missing out on.

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Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

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A recent technique for Bloggers to quickly build up some good link authority to new blogs & websites is to Sponsor various WordPress Themes using varying anchor text.

Why is this good?

Well, first of all you can sponsor a theme fairly cheap. We’re talking from $25+ depending on where in the world the person who designed it is from.

Secondly, you can choose the exact anchor text you want to rank for in the link.

Thirdly, if the theme gets popular (have a look at themes.wordpress.net) you could be looking at upwards of 2000-4000+ installs. This equates to sitewide links on a HEAP of blogs.

Where can I get some of this action?

Simple, it’s all about networking. If you see a theme you like then simply email the author politely something like this:

Hey there %name% this is Stuart from Earners Blog. I really love your most recent WordPress Theme & would love to sponsor it! Sponsorship would be nothing more than a link in the footer to my website & of course I would pay you to include it. How does $300 sound?

I’ve actually struck up a nice relationship with some Bloggers so much that when they write a new theme they ask me if I’d like to sponsor it right away (Why wouldn’t they?).

Need somewhere to start?

How about contacting some of the designers in this post

Happy Link Building

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However I’ve seen a few good April Fools linkbait examples that deserve some link love:

Google Themselves: have crafted this fantastic concept of receiving wireless internet in your house free using the patented GFlushâ„¢ system.

The second one that caught my attention was Matt Cutts & The Dark SEO Team each seemingly “hacking” each other in a rather amusing fashion. One would assume that if Matt knew his blog was hacked it’d be fixed fairly quickly…..

Finally the last one of note was Shoemoney who came up with this Cryptic Graphic which any of you fanatical Lost watchers would have recognised as the Hanso Foundation symbol.

The problem with April Fools linkbait is that you can’t really capatilize on it until you have a good foothold in the market. You need a loyal fanbase that will email others, post on blogs, post of forums to find out why the site is down or who hacked you. So as the old saying goes, the rich get richer

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You can then use the promo code spring to get a further 15% discount from any orders that you make for the month of march. Find more Textlinkads Coupons.

This is a great time to start advertising on Earners Blog & get your website or service in front of thousands of targeted affiliate marketers every day. You can purchase a text link for $100/month via textlinkads. Use the discount above & get your first month FREE.

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Nearly Every Link to the website (over 450) had some really really targeted Anchor Text.

I instantly thought to myself “Wow, these guys are really solid linkbuilders”

I had a look at a half a dozen of the sites they had links on & all the sites contained Web Counters with the targeted keyword phrase underneath the counter. Hmmmmm…..

Then I delved a bit deeper & came across this site: Counter Data

Whilst on the surface it may appear to be another Free Web Counter website they actually are doing some really ingenious stuff with the advertising side of things.

Notice how the demo counter at the top has the word “Sponsor” underneath it? Well the counter script that you put on your site allows anyone to sponsor that particular counter.

Prices run from $10 to $20 per counter & you can choose whatever anchor text you want. So my guess is that if you approach these guys with say $5000 you’ll get a ton of really really cheap links.

How long this tactic will actually remain around for & how long before these types of links are devalued who knows. What I do know is that this tactic currently works, I’ve seen some sites rank purely on these links alone.

The main problem with relying purely on bought links like this is, what happens when Google finally devalues or debunks this method? Or what happens if they decide to penalise the site who’s buying the links as well as devalue the link? This is something that we cannot predict so buyer beware

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There are a number of sites that aggregate your RSS feed & turn it into a static HTML page. This means you can submit your feed & the spiders will be able to find & follow those links.

Advantages include:

1. The link has the anchor text of your title
2. You can have upwards of 10 links on some pages
3. Title of the page can be chosen, or can be the title of your blog

Here’s an example of what i’m talking about on Feedburner:

Because I show the 30 most recent posts in my feed I get 30 links back to Earners Blog. I’m pretty sure Feedburner redirects now but the spiders still follow.

Here’s a list of other sites that allow you to use a facility like this:

1. Feedburner
2. Bloglines
3. Squidoo
4. Hubpages
5. Syndic8
6. Feedboy
7. Feedbomb
8. Feedfury
9. Feedcat
10. Rssmad

Most of these services will require a backlink to the page with the RSS feeds so they initally get indexed by Google. Usually I open up a del.icio.us account & import all the RSS feeds then ping them from there. You should notice a nice increase in backlinks & spider activity after using this technique. Enjoy.

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Oh well, it’s fixed now :p

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1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Getting New Sites Indexed
3. Ranking

Squidoo is a Web 2.0 type social community. You can create a “Lens” & basically fill it with stuff. Links, Photos, Amazon Feeds etc etc

The site seems to get a lot of authority & trust from Google, so much so that you’ll quite often see Squidoo pages ranking for competitive terms. This can make Squidoo a potential Gold Mine for Affiliate Product Reviews & even promoting your own Website.

To give you a bit of an example I’ve created a lens on Squidoo for Earners Blog.

Check out the Page On Squidoo

Creating this lens allows me to do a number of interesting things:

1. Add my RSS Feed as static HTML Links
2. Include Links to anywhere I want with the Anchor Text I want
3. Do a blurb or Review about the site & include Hyperlinks in there too

I’ve just linked back to the lens from this post which will help it get indexed, pretty quickly I reckon. So It will be very interesting to see how it ranks on Google & whether it brings in any Traffic. Aside from that, I can create as MANY lenses as I want. So for example I may create a lens reviewing a particular affiliate product or use another lens to link to various sections of my other sites.

This is a goldmine for people, here’s an example of a Squidoo page ranking for a popular Affiliate Product (Affiliate Project X):

That particular page has about 31 Backlinks, mostly from social bookmarking sites (which are easy to get & something I’ll be touching on later this week). With a bit more work, this page could be ranking much higher

If you’ve found this post useful I urge you to rate my lens using the ratings at the top & also join the group I’ve created for Earners. We can then help each other by rating lenses & increase the exposure for our sites or blogs

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That aside I often get asked a few questions, from both sides of the divide.

The first one is from the white-hat:

“Why isn’t my site getting indexed & why are my pages going supplemental?”

This is fairly easy to answer, you can’t expect to throw up a site & not work on getting backlinks. Zero backlinks equals zero trust, which equals shit rankings or supplemental pages.

Then from the black-hat:

“I’m spitting out sites like no tomorrow, they’re up for a week then banned….why?”

Again this is easy to answer but it shows a different side. Blackhat’s are willing to promote anywhere, get their sites indexed & ranked using any method possible. Problem is (and it’s a big problem), that most of the sites are low quality, have a huge page count (possibly cloaked). So even though the sites rank, they get reported or trip the filters & get dumped.

This whole theory is quite interesting for me as I’ve always been somewhere in the divide. I can’t see the value in making 100 disposable sites only to see them get banned a month later. But on the other hand I can’t make a good site & sit around asking for links or writing link bait to get links all day.

In today’s day & age I think all webmasters should be looking outside the box to get links, to promote their sites & to rank where they want to rank. The internet is not going to do you any favours, nor are other webmasters who want to rank for the same keywords as you do.

So here’s a few methods of promotion for your sites:

Blog Comments: Leave comments on other blogs, drop some html in with the comment & try to be polite or civil. Sometimes you can find some realy good links. I mentioned Comment Hut in my last post, this will find blogs for you to do this. You could always use a comment spam script although I prefer the manual method as I mentioned I don’t build sites in mass.

Blogger Blogs: Creating a network of blogger blogs to blog & ping with is a great way to get links. They call this the blogger slam. There’s software out there that’ll do this like Blogger Generator.

Forums: Registering on Vbulletin forums will allow you to place a link to your website in your profile. Do this 500 times & you have 500 easy backlinks. A program like Xrumer will do this. Some forums also allow you to have a signature, like Digitalpoint make good use of your signature space.

Social Networking: Submitting you sites to social networking sites that don’t have the nofollow attribute is a good method of promotion. I’ll post a list of the best social networking sites to submit to tomorrow

Guestbooks: Do you have any idea how many old forgotten Guestbooks are lying around? Loads! Just go into Google, see who’s ranking on Viagra spam then see where they’re getting their links from using the linkdomain: command in Yahoo.

Directories: Submit to directories. Not really that complex. If it’s a decent site you’ll have no problem with this one. You can get a directory list at Vilesilencer

Blog Networks: You can use software like Blogsolution or Rss2blog to create your own army of blogs, post to them automatically everyday, gather up Page Rank, then use these to help your main sites rank.

Authority Sites: Getting links on authority sites like Wikipedia or Squidoo is fairly easy.

There’s a few more methods but I’ll keep those under wraps for now. But you get the idea. You don’t have to go out there spamming the shit out of the place. Use these ideas for your sites & put them to good use, don’t abuse them. Ease the links in gently to make it look natural. 1000 links popping up overnight will look suspicious

And for goodness sake make sure you use decent Anchor Text. Don’t post links like this:

http://www.earnersblog.com

Post them like this:

Earn Money Online

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Myspace

This still works, in fact I haven’t tried it in a while. Reason being is that Google’s results only show up to 1000 for a particular query so I had completely saturated all the results :p

Anyway it’s quite simple really. This is an easy way for you to get expired Myspace Accounts that have a decent Page Rank then re-register them & put whatever links you want on the page I’ve managed to get anything up to a PR6 doing this, although mostly PR4′s.

Firstly I’ll run you through the idea. It’s always good to see exactly what goes through someones mind when they come up with an idea like this.

I was browsing through Google one afternoon & came across a Myspace Profile, I clicked on the URL & I got this interesting message:

This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.

However, looking at my handy Firefox Pagerank plugin I was amazed to see that the page had a Page Rank of 4! Nice.

So, being naturally curious I decided to try & re-register the username that was in the url (http://www.myspace.com/username/). These are the only types of URL’s this works with. If the URL contains strings or just numbers it won’t work.

Just register using your normal details, then when it asks you to choose a username use the username in the URL.

I now had myself a shiny Page Rank 4 Myspace account. However, I decided to take it to another level & do it…….on a mass scale.

To do that I simply just used the following operator in google:

Click Here

This shows you the entire list of all expired Myspace accounts up to 1000 (since google’s results don’t go past that). So according to Google there’s around 21,000 expired accounts up for grabs.

I now copied the url’s in mass from every page into excel & got rid of all the crap ones. So I’m looking for urls that look like:

http://www.myspace.com/someidiotsnamehere/

Once I’ve finished that I’ll probably have a list of about 600-700 or so. Now comes the fun part. Checking the pagerank of each URL. To do that I use a tool called Parameter, that’ll check the Page Rank of URL’s in bulk. Once that’s done I’ll have a list of all the URL’s that are PR4+.

Now you just need to go & register them.

Bear in mind that I registered them all about 2 months ago, so I would like to think the serps have updated a bit since then.

Happy hunting

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You can pick up easy links from either Squidoo or Wikipedia as long as you are tactful in your approach.

Squidoo: Sign up, create some lenses around your topic & simply add your links with relevant anchor text. Then put a link to squidoo on one of your other sites to get the page indexed. Once it’s indexed by Google you’ll get some link love

Wikipedia: Try & find a page that’s related to your site but not too popular, the higher the Page Rank the better. Simply add the link to your site in the External Links section. Quite often you’ll get caught out & the link will be deleted, but if they deem it relevant enough it’ll stay in.

I get 200+ Uniques per day to one of my sites through various Wikipedia links, so it’s definitely worth looking into.

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I submitted a brand new domain with a simple install of wordpress last Thursday. The domain was a .com.au, with no incoming links.

First the Bad News:

MSN Failed to Index the Site (Oh Well, can’t win em all)

The Good News:

Yahoo picked up the site within 32 hours
Google indexed the site within 72 hours

Not only that, the domain is ranking number 6 in results from Australia for its designated keyword. So get on over to Blue Hat SEO try it out & if it works, drop him a donation for such a cool toy.

Recommended Reading:

• Blog SEO
• SEO Book

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Entitled QUIT (or Quick Indexing Tool) this tool should help you get around those long waits for your new site to get picked up in the engines.

How does it work?

Well the methodology has been kept secret to a certain extent but here’s a few of the steps that the script takes.

1. Submits your site to 6 Social Bookmarking Websites
2. The Googlebot Slam, remotely tricks Google into thinking your site has lots of fresh content.
3. Global Ping, pings all major networks so they send their spiders to visit your site.
4. And other techniques that are not disclosed.

What are the Results so far?

I’ve tried it on two sites & have seen spider activity increase 2 fold. It’s too early to tell whether it’s effective for me yet but I’ll report more soon.

Here’s some of the stats reported from the use of the tool:

27% of sites were already in the index. This is fine. Even if they are already in the index go ahead and submit them anyways. It’ll help the rest of your site get indexed.

31% Made it into the index within 27 hours of running the tool. YAY!

22% Made it into Yahoo and MSN within 27 hours but didn’t make it into Google until 48 hours. Damn Google why you gotta mess with me like that

5% Didn’t make it into all three until 48 hours.

2% Didn’t make it into all three until 72 hours.

13% Never made it in to to all three.

If you want to try out the tool visit: Quick Indexing Tool

Recommended Reading:

• SEO Book

Recommended Resources:

• Keyword Elite

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