The 2nd Quarter Pagerank update came and went, and most webmasters didn’t even feel it. It started mid Feb 2008 and ended  just a week ago. Many experienced PR and SERP loss (again). In my case, some sites went down a notch in PR, but surprisingly hit the top 1 to 3 spots for SERP. Goes to show that PR is really meaningless unless you sell links.

In this article, I’ll disclose some additional methods of gathering  quick links without the purchase of link building software like Axandra. It’s pretty easy when you discover that there’s a way to automate it with php scripts and online services.

Bookmarking Services
Many of us bookmark individually. This entails signing up at bookmarking sites like technorati and sphere then using the same nickname/password for each. That’s tedious! I suggest exploring two services accomplish this this faster. Mosey over to http://www.OnlyWire.com, and http://www.SocialPoster.com. Once you’re signed up, you can  bookmark to multiple sites with a single click. Altough many of these are no-followed, the given anchor text can still give you a boost.

Digg Assaulting
Keep a wary eye on digg, newsvine, netscape and other social news site. As stories hit the front page, comment on the article itself, (no, not on digg).   If something frontpages Digg, you can be sure that it may eventually gain massive PR from all the traffic going into it. You will benefit from both the PR juice AND the eyeballs directed to that article from organic traffic and RSS syndication.

Piqq.us for Automated Digging
Piqq used to be called diggboss- and it’s better than subvertandprofit.com. Once you signup, you digg/stumble/propel their members, and in exchange, they extend the same for your stories. It’s vital that your articles possess above average quality- or you can be drummed out of the site. The service may not propell you to the front page, but you can darned expect to reach the  ”upcoming”, or “Most Votes So far” page for as long as possible.

Intelligent Trackbacks and Commenting

Open a new window and check out http://commenthunt.com/. The site identifies different blogs implementing a do-follow link policy.  Search for friendly blogs and fire an intelligent comment or two on related topics. Do be aware that blog admins are more vigilant for comment spam in these blogs. Don’t comment on the same blog more than 5x in a single day, or Akismet anti-spam will flush you in the toilet. Also  take note of entry dates. Nothing can be more annoying than seeing comments on a 5 year old post.

Create a  Free Templates

Many template sites are more than happy to accept free templates for Wordpress, Joomla, PhpBB, Drupal and other open source CMS. Either make them yourself, or commission someone to make a pile of beautiful templates for you. The trick is to encrypt a  backlink to your site in the footer of these templates so that whenever someone uses them, you get new link love for your homepage. One thing you probably didn’t know is that  web design and seo consulting sites got their high pageranks by integrating “powered by xxx” or “designed by xxx” into the footers of their clients’ sites. All those ‘votes’ ultimately  earned them stratospheric ranking. Check out statcounter.com, the PR9 site. Their tracking script bears their link on all webs using their services. You can do the same with free templates.

There’s a predicted backlink and PR export this coming April. If you’re fanatic over this, now’s the time to start an aggressive backlink campaign!