Posts Tagged ‘Back Links’
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
 GadZooks! The Fauklands are being invaded AGAIN!? When it comes to ranking in the SERPs that count, there’s no such thing as enough back links (well, unless they come from bad neighbourhood sites… but that’s a post for another time). But how do you get good quality back links for free? Especially when sites with a decent PR are usually out right refusing, or want some hard cash?
Press releases…
Not only do these things often rank well for given terms, you’re also basically guaranteed a spot for a few minutes in the “real time” search on Google & Bing, and you’ll stick around for a little while in Google News if you’ve submitted to a quality site.
Of course the problem is finding quality sites that you can submit to, without it actually costing you anything. And I know you guys have better ways of spending your time than researching that stuff, so I’ve done it for you.
Here’s 18 free press release distribution sites for you, and I’ve thrown in their basic Google PR as well because I know some of you love to sculpt that stuff like it’s Play-Doh.
| URL |
PR Value |
| http://www.betanews.com |
7 |
| http://news.thomasnet.com/ |
6 |
| http://www.npr.org/ |
6 |
| http://www.bizeurope.com/ |
6 |
| http://www.free-press-release.com/ |
5 |
| http://www.downloadjunction.com |
5 |
| http://www.openpr.com/ |
5 |
| http://www.pressbox.co.uk/ |
5 |
| http://www.filecluster.com/ |
5 |
| http://www.afreego.com/ |
5 |
| http://www.pressreleasespider.com/ |
4 |
| http://www.itbsoftware.com/ |
4 |
| http://www.itbinternet.com |
4 |
| http://www.newsblaster.com/ |
4 |
| http://freepressindex.com/ |
3 |
| http://www.i-newswire.com/ |
3 |
| http://www.techprspider.com/ |
3 |
| http://www.pressreleasecirculation.com/ |
2 |
The real benefit of a press release is that, under Google’s current algorithm, as they age, they gain importance by virtue of being a press release and are more likely to show up in informational searches. It’s not like article marketing on EZA where they basically get tossed aside after a while because of the disposable nature of the site.
However you do need to keep in mind that you can’t just spam a press release site, and your article does need to be 1) professional in tone; and 2) actually seem newsworthy in some way.
Many of them actively actively approve or prune articles, and will ban spammy accounts.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
About two weeks ago, Yahoo! decided to finally shut down Geocities.
In case you don’t know what Geocities was, because you’re under 15 years old or were living under a rock since 1994, it was basically the precursor to MySpace. Free websites for everyone with a very basic GUI that allowed you to build a website that was amazingly painful to look at, generally filled with spelling errors, and often related to some kind of scam or racist material… util they cleaned it up in the early 00s at any rate.
 Geocities burns to the ground The point is that it was freakin’ huge. Comparatively speaking, it would have had a similar per capita user base that MySpace currently enjoys. There were tens of thousands of sites of sites built that link to some page on Geocities pages of “relevant” information. Those links are now orphaned and have nowhere to point to.
Which is a goldmine for you to pick up on, as pointed out by the good folk at IAMSEO
They recommend using the following search string in Google to find sites that are relevant to you:
site:geocities.com inurl: your-keyword
One you’ve found the actual sites that were linked to that had relevance to your keyword, use Yahoo!s own Site Explorer to tell you where those links were coming from in the first place.
After that, it’s a matter of contacting the site owners and asking them if they’re aware that Geocities is gone, and would they perhaps like to link to your site now.
It’s certainly an arduous and long process if you don’t have a way to automate it, such as scripting, but it will be quite rewarding, as many of those links will be as old as the Geocities sites themselves, meaning the site they come from has some good link juice to be squeezed.
And if that doesn’t work, there’s always dropping links in their comments and/or guestbooks 
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Does that make sense? Not really.
Intrigued by it and want to read more?
 Turns out he didn't die... and wasn't in a car crash... and is actually white! Well, probably not if you’re not a fan of Kanye West, which I’m not so I wouldn’t read it… but pretend you like inferior rap music (Seriously, it’s not 2LiveCrew, it’s inferior…). Now wouldn’t you be intrigued and potentially click through?
If you said no, you’re probably lying to yourself.
Because this exact trick was used to get hundreds of thousands of suckers, suckers who are potentially your next conversion, to load their computer with fake security software. Not only was this security software totally fake, they were also charged money for it, had their credit card and contact details logged, and probably sold on for later use by criminals somewhere in a former Soviet state, with the people behind harvesting all these details now richer than the Prime Minster of Australia (proudly celebrating 40 years of running electricity!).
 The trick specifically?
Create fake, controversial news that people want to believe, and quickly spam it out to numerous social media channels, remembering to +1 it about 100 times through social bookmarks, and have it go to a faked blog that’s relevant to the topic. Then you have your affiliate marketing program as a part of the site with calls to action along the lines of “<action> to their last <creative work> before they tragically died”.
 Learn this technique, learn to refine it. You can do it to smaller and smaller groups, eventually manipualting individuals to do as you please. Dance, my puppets, DANCE! Some of our cleverer affiliates did this the moment they heard Michael Jackson had died, and experienced bumper profits for a week. This was using real news.
Real news does not last long, however, as you are going to get quickly outranked by major news sources, and you are not the original source of the information. Linkbaiting it gives you control over the entirety of the message delivery from start to finish, and if it’s believable, you’ll get about 6-12 hours of pure internet hysteria. People retweeting your original tweets (remember to have a few twitter accounts that you can use to retweet your hashtags, link and message), others +1ing your Diggs and Stumbles… in the meantime, all this goes back to your blog that you threw up 2-3 hours ago.
We call activities like this “Social Engineering”.
It’s powerful, so don’t over use it, and certainly don’t screw it up.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Recently, I received a question from one of our affiliates about a particular black hat method of boosting their Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP).
Particularly, it was about a method they’d read about on a forum: Link Farming.
I’ll admit that I’m not an expert at this. I’m more of a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy when it comes to making money online. I know a lot of theory, but I simply have not had the time (or incentive) to try every method out there. This is one I’ve dabbled in briefly, so whilst I’m not ignorant of it, I’m no expert
Caveat Perfectus.
The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MS Live, all use algorithms that have a couple of functions in common. One of them is relevance by back links. That is, the more links you have, the more relevant they believe your site to be. Google takes it a step further and adds extra weight to sites that have a whole heap of links from other sites that have a whole heap of links, etc etc.
(Don’t both trying to understand Google’s ranking algorithm, it’ll hurt your brain)
So what better way to get ranked well then to automatically generate a whole heap of sites, and have them all link to your main site, or buy thousands of back links, right?
Well, wrong, actually…
Google and MS Live have something about “natural link building”. In the real world, sites don’t suddenly have a thousand links. They get a few links, then a few dozen, then maybe 50-60, then a couple hundred, etc. Natural link growth grows like that before reaching a plateua for a few days and then levelling off and dropping back down. Virally if you will.
The black hat part of this comes from automated blogging. The process of that is a post for another time. However, if you are using blog CMS such as Wordpress, it’s possible to get plugins that will automatically look for keywords in your posts, and link them appropriately for you. Combined that with the automated posts that are relevant to your main site, and you’ll occasionally get a link from each of these blogs back to your main site. Enough of these automated blogs (honestly, about 20 ought to do it), and you’ll should be getting a few links every day from “different sites”.
If you are going to purchase your links, make sure there is an agreement to have no more than a few dozen links added daily until you’ve used up all of your links. If you are buying links you’re also going to be aware that Google penalises sites that it knows has purchased links. There are links from some sites that will also hurt your SERP. “Bad neighbourhoods” online of people basically selling links from sites that are nothing but poorly made directories. Enough links from sites like these will damage your placement.
Be sure to stay tuned for more posts on increasing your SERP, and mistakes to avoid.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Hi again folks.
Another SEO question. I’m beginning to feel like I should be getting some sort of logo and start shaving my head… or photographing every meal I eat and telling you about it instead of talking about how I actually make my money.
This week’s question was about submitting to directories.
This is some really old school stuff here, so a bit of internet history first guys.
I don’t know how many of you were online before Google, but this stuff reaches back that far. YES, there was a on the internet before Google existed! Shocking, I know. Anyway, before Google hit the scene, most of the search engines out there, like Lycos, Yahoo, Alta Vita, etc., were pretty amazingly crap… And that’s putting it nicely.
The whole reason keyword stuffing exists at all? Because most of those search engines worked on keyword indexation, but they all did it slightly differently, so you had to configure your site a dozen different ways to get it to rank well universally. There was an ok engine called Dog Pile that ranked you according to how all the other larger SEs of the time ranked you. But I digress…
Before these engines, and even during their hey-day, the only way to really navigate the net and find what you wanted was a site that was basically a large list of other sites in a particular niche, with a bit of a description on each: Link Directories.
They often worked by you linking to them on your site, and they’d link back to you in exchange so you were a part of it. The more advanced ones had some randomization script and became Web Rings.
Back in the present day, the major SEs algorithms work on a number of things, including number of inbound links and age of the site & domain.
Think about it a second. You’ve got some sites over a decade old, with hundreds if not thousands of links back to them, often from sites equally old. It makes for some good PR value for the original Link Directories like DMOZ or Jayde.
So, to the original question, is there value in linking your site from Link Directories?
Yes and no.
Yes if you’ve managed to get a link in the older ones.
No if you’re linking from the newer ones that are usually flagged for what they are… crap, worthless link spam. If you’re thinking about buying links to increase your SERP, think again about buying them from a place offering you hundreds or thousands of directory listings. It’ll usually be poison.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
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