Right, this part of the post is going to be a bit shorter than usual but the tip you’re getting is priceless.
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.
Stealth Link Building – Part 3
Stealth Link Building – Part 2
First of all apologies for the lack of updates recently. I’ve just moved house & I’ve been without net access (we all know how long & arduous it is transferring utilities from one house to another). I’ve got some good posts in the works though so don’t go anywhere
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:
Sponsored Links
Partners
Advertising
Paid Advertising
Sponsors
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
Stealth Link Building – Part 1
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?
Well firstly you can choose which pages your link will appear on
You can choose the anchor text
You can make an informed decision about how much link weight or authority the site will pass
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 Link Building tactics
Recropical Link Cloaking – What you Need to Know
We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.
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
50+ Social News Websites: Notes about this list
;50+ Social News Websites: Notes about this list
I spent some time going through hundreds of social news sites and came up with a list of sites which I think are worth exploring. Each site on this list is evaluated according to various criteria, including the no. of votes for each story and the frequency/date of submissions, all of which are indicators of user/viewer activity.
Social News websites are communities which allow its users to submit news stories, articles and media (videos/pictures) and share them with other users or the general public. Some of these articles will be given more visibility, depending on various factors such as the number of user votes for each item.
Apart from counting registered user votes, some social news websites employ human editors to determine the visibility of each news item. Certain stories will be removed from the website while others may be given a ‘featured‘ position if the story is highly relevant and news worthy.
Niche Social News Websites
