Link Building Guide Part 2 - Social Profile Bumping
21. Dec 2007 | 47 Comments
Yesterday’s technique was just the beginning, once this tutorial is over you should have all the link building information you need to really make your sites kick some Google ass. The reason I mentioned using yahoo for link building first is that it forces you to think outside the box & it also means you’re not using the same technique or looking at the same backlink profile as everyone else.
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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47 Comments on "Link Building Guide Part 2 - Social Profile Bumping"
Hi Stu,
Nice post, but I’m not sure about all those 20 sites above are dofollow links. For example, I’m 99% sure that digg nofollows the links on your “digg.com/users/username” page.
I also (although am less sure here) thought Technorati nofollowed the links… they seem to nofollow everything on there 
Same with magnolia…
I could be wrong though, but from what I’ve seen they’re nofollowed?
Very nice post. Got me to thinking a bit more about using profiles for backlinking in terms of inner linking between profile pages. Makes a good bit of sense since it seems somewhat natural in the social networking world… nice tip
Also, as far as the dofollow/nofollow debate is concerned, who cares. You pointed it out already “A Link is a Link, no matter where it comes from” - if it’s nofollow and the engines actually adhere to it, you get your site spidered (deep links) - I really think it’s a non-issue. The marketing FUD on this topic has been really good…
Nice post, you’ve obviously put a lot of time into this. I agree that some of these sites use nofollow rules but then .. do Google et al adhere to this anyway?
Nice post, although profile building / linking can and does get boring at times, it is a great way to build up links. Nofollow or not, links can only be helpful in the long run.
@gadget:
Google advocate “nofollow” and mention it quite a bit in their webmaster blog. They’d be hypocrites if they didn’t adhere to it!
Even if the link is no-follow, as long as there is anchor text, it’s still telling the spider something. But Myspace ads java around the link, so if you’re gonna use myspace with this technique, you’ll want to use the workaround to get rid of the java and give the link seo benefit.
You should have mentioned that Stuart!
Once again, some quality info Stuart. Your readers may find Social Marker to be a handy tool for shortcutting this process. SM will submit to 30 social bookmarking sites all at once. http://www.socialmarker.com/
Very interesting article, I have certainly learnt a lot as with all of your articles.
Great read!! Valuable information! Thanks so much
Dead on. Setting up your social bookmarking profiles correctly is a must for link building. The idea of building a spreadsheet is invaluable. I use a spreadsheet to not only track my profile URLs and passwords, but also how frequently I participate. The links are good, but active participation is where I see a real boost.
great post and great blog. I hope to learn a lot here. I’m just begining with my blog: http://earningmoneywithblogs.blogspot.com/
THANKS.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
What I like about this technique is that the site quickly gains trust with the Google, and the sandbox effect will be much less if the site is new.
Can you explain the “interlink them with one another”
By interlink them with one another do you mean book mark the profiles?
Wish you had a white board
Thanks a lot i think im getting a hang of this now..
I still wonder just to make sure. I have now created 50 profiles to start with.
Should i now start with profile 1 and just bookmark the other 49 profiles there? Then just continue with profile 2 and do the same? I understand that i need to get the first 1 or 2 in google index first. After all is linked together they should have pretty much power so then i use profile 1 and link to one of my aff sites and get the linkpower from 50 sites?
Thanks for a great site.
Just start with a few profiles on 5 sites. Then add more. You’ll have a natural increase in links that way instead of 50 today, 50 tomorrow, etc…
Would you use multipal bookmarking sites(with fi onlywire.com or socialmarker) or do you use just one bookmarking site and have a new profile just for this network?
So, I’m in the process of building my link mesh, and it occured to me that those of us who are building things thing could form a powerful co-op if we were to point these things at each others non-competing sites. Does such a co-op exist? If not, I’m considering trying to get something together. Thoughts?
How are we linking all our social media network together? I’m also pondering on what Stefan asked…
What stephen and dennis asked, i’d like to know the answer as well.
Here a list from DoshDosh blog of more Social News sites you can use to build up your LINKING POWER!
Thats a great idea, there are now tons of places where you can put your link for completely free, thats really great thing.
Thanks for the info. Me too creates a list. It helps me remember the details.
Hi again,
Just wonder if any of you guys have any probs gettign the profiles indexed? I have interlinked about 30 of them and have some of my older domains pointing on two or three of them. Still they get indexed for awhile.. and then a week later they gone again. They seem to jump in and out of google index and it seems really hard to keep them there. Any ideas on this?
Br,
Stefan
Don’t forget about http://www.onlywire.com to speed things up a little
Think I’ve got a lot of job to do but all the same, thanks for the advise and the links
I’ve set up an initial network of 20 and interlinked them all but please can I clarify how to build the links within the network. If I’ve got an existing site and I want a particular page to perform, do I submit the page to all 20 sites in my network (or 50 or 100 when my network grows). What would your recommendation be having used the technique sucessfully?
Anyone find somewhere to put a follow link on wink.com?
Great technique..
But what anchor text do we need to put when we bookmark other profiles? do we put something like “myname’s profile on digg” or whatever ? or we put some keywords that we want to ?
also what Russell asked, I am interested in the answer, too.
Thanks a lot!
Ok I need some help.
So I have created 20 Digg accounts. Activated them and now I’m ready to go? What do I do next?
Wow glad I stubled upon this site. I have an affiliate site I want to promote, should I use my own keyword rich domain and redirect to my affiliate site ?
Is it a good idea for my link to go to a capture page or should it go to a complete website? I ask this because I’ve read that stumbleupon users dont like sales pages too much.
Stuart,
Should they actually be interlinked (all reciprocals) or would it be better to do a bunch of triangles? Wouldn’t this be harder to look unnatural and also wont it work better on passing some authority? I have done them as you described so far but am wondering if triangular linking would work better?
btw - this works great for getting sites indexed fast
Some very nice tips here, thanks for sharing.
good post, but is there an answer for russell and Zoran.
im having trouble grasping that part. do we submit our website to each one of the profiles, or just one of them.
hi,
i have a questions, do we make an account to these social bookmarking site for each of the domains we are trying to promote? so if we are trying to market 2 websites, are we goingto have 2 different accounts for digg ( as an example )
Aye, you want to submit each of the profiles to all of the sites I don’t do it all at once though, try to sprinkle them in as you’re posting stories/products etc.
nice post. thanks for the new knowledge
Incredible tip man. Kudos to you!
Stuart, I am finding some sites with follow links but using an image for the anchor and some others with follow links but they are redirects using a script on the bookmark site.
Can you comment on the SEO worth of these?
PS. Keep up the good work.. I’ve been a long time reader of your blog.
Sorry, I am a little lost and see that there are a few others that are experiencing some uncertainties with regards to how to do this. Would it be possible for someone to explain in a textual flowchart? For example, verify this is correct or modify it for the rest of us…Create Excel Spread Sheet to track usernames, passwords, tags/ ancor text used, and page of website submitted==>Create multiple profiles on various, popular social bookmarking websites and update excel spreadsheet with username and passwords==>Submit site pages to all (this is wehre I am confused…do I submit links to each profile?) profiles and update excel with ancor text and page link submitted==>Link profiles together so that you have your own social network of “friends” who share the same interests in websites as you…kind of like online multiple personality disorder
So, is this right?
Thanks stuart, Ive been using social marker to quickly get links from 40 social bookmarking sites, each with new content from my sites. I hadnt thought of bookmarking the profiles of other SM sites.
This site is a great source on information. I never realized the importance of back linking until now. Also using profiles in genius. Thanks!
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Hey Burgo, in either case you can see add a live link somewhere in those profile, or in the Case of digg if you leave any URL’s in comments they’ll show on your profile too