Savvy Backlink Strategies You Should Be Doing
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!
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Comment by Beth on 21 March 2008:
Social bookmarking can be very time consuming and tedious, often with little benefit. I’ll have to check out the 2 sites you mentioned. These are some good strategies.
Comment by Sam on 19 March 2008:
Another great technique for building up backlinks is article marketing… Simply put a link in your resource box back to your site along with your article submission. Just make sure to create a bunch of different boxes for each submission.
Comment by The User on 18 March 2008:
Most of our sites saw a moderate PR bump, but I think that may have been due to them just being new sites.
CommentHunt is an interesting site and I’ve used it to help get new sites listed, but I actually ended up rolling my own custom script. Nothing too fancy, but I’ve gotten better results with it.
Comment by joseph plazo on 18 March 2008:
Okay, got a piqq invite:
http://piqqus.com/signup.php?r=5009&c=7f9e61r2nj47dfcb4499
Just make sure you use discretion and digg only newsworthy stuff. Otherwise your account will be banned by digg AND you will pollute the system with trash.
Comment by joseph plazo on 18 March 2008:
I ran out- let me see about getting new ones.
A new tip I’d like to discuss in the next article is about installing SEOQuake into your Fireofox
http://ff.seoquake.com/
I found it a superb method of building high PR backlinks to your blog.
Install it first and I’ll get into details by weekend.
Joey
Comment by Martin on 17 March 2008:
Joseph do you have an invitation to Piqq.us by chance ?
Comment by Shashank on 17 March 2008:
Nice tips there Joseph.. i don’t think sites like piqq are worth spending time.
Comment by Matt on 17 March 2008:
Thanks for the superb tips Joseph
Theres a couple there that I hadn’t thought of previously, so will try them out and see how things go!
Comment by Futon-Matt on 17 March 2008:
I thought this was a great post. I checked out the Digg tip and plan on repeating that one.
Comment by Sumesh on 17 March 2008:
Statcounter is particularly sleazy. I nofollowed their html link, and it worked fine. Either they should nofollow it or remove it. Aodhan Cullan used to be a nice guy, but not any more. Suckers