Backlink Building Methods

Some Clarification

OK, so we all know what a backlink is. In fact, we are all probably ravenously scouring the web for new places to place a backlink in our spare time. For clarification purposes, however, I must state now that backlinks are basically “popularity votes” for your website. This is one of the many statistics the search engines use to determine where to rank the billions of websites out there. So yeah, they’re pretty important.

What, exactly, is a backlink made of?

Backlinks can technically take only a couple of forms. A raw backlink is simply a url in the form:

 There are several things to notice about this type, however. The lack of a “www” in the url is up to the webmaster. If the site is not set up properly with 301 redirects, this could look like a different site to the search engines. Another thing to notice is the “/blah/blah” directories. This is called a deep backlink, one that does not link directly to the main index page, but still links to the domain. It is a great idea to spend part of your time building deep backlinks, especially if you have a blog or forum that you want spidered fairly often. This is just one method of getting the search engines’ attention, however. My preferred method blends this with pinging, but that is for another post.

The other type of backlink is the anchor text backlink. This is a link that is hidden behind well thought out phrases or keywords. The structure of this link is basically:

This is a far more effective method of backlinking, but not all websites allow anchor text. Hubpages, for one, does not allow the html tag <a href…>. Instead, they have a nifty tool for automatically setting up anchor text with links.  They will even scan your hub to suggest links based on your phrases.  Anchor text links, coupled with some thorough keyword research can mean all the difference between page one and page two of the search results. Whenever this is permitted, I like to pepper my blog posts with a few. The same url structuring caveats apply to the actual url, obviously.

A Word On The Methods

The actual best practices of building backlinks is something that is hotly debated. This debate will never be finished, however, for a few very good reasons. For one thing, the search engines are constantly changing the way they value backlinks. As spammers flood the search engines with millions of backlinks, the SE’s respond by determining which type is being exploited, and devalue that type. Bloggers and webmasters pick up on the changing values and spread the word.

Now, I must point out that some spammers simply get put in the sandbox. This means that their website won’t be ranked very well, regardless of the backlinks. This is a way for the search engines to avoid punishing everyone. Another point is that some sites that are being spammed for backlinks simply adopt a “nofollow” tag for all links. This has been the case in many of the KickApps Web2.0 sites that have been so popular with spammers recently. Other sites, like Hubpages, require authors to have a high quality rating before their links become “dofollow”.

Another factor that will fuel the debate for years to come is the “guru products”. We’ve all seen these over-hyped, under-intelligent products being hawked in emails and websites. They all claim to know the secret to successful marketing, and some claim to have methods that will make you 6 figures in 20 minutes flat. Some are ebooks, others are video series, but the really dangerous culprits are the backlink automators.

Products like Social Bookmarking Demon, SENuke, Blogger Generator, BlogSolution, and countless others are built to allow you to quickly build a ton of backlinks in no time flat. Now, at this point I must admit that I own all of these (shouldn’t be too surprising), and I do use them. And yes, I know that they all have affiliate programs, I just don’t want to sell anything in this post. My point? They have all had a hand in shaping the way backlinks are valued by the search engines. Remember the Web2.0 sites I mentioned earlier? SENuke has a module that automates the creation of accounts to these sites. It also allows you to post content to these sites at record speeds. Before the great KickApps nofollow movement of ’09, you could literally post hundreds of backlinks in about 15 minutes. SENuke users flooded these sites with fake accounts, and KickApps responded accordingly. Clearly, moderation would benefit all, but who wants to be careful when there’s millions at stake?

The Not So All Inclusive List Of Backlinking Methods

Now, I am going to list all of the methods that I am aware of. Keep in mind that there are probably many more out there. Also, these are in no particular order.

1. Article Marketing

2. Directory Listings

3. Twitter Updates

4. Blog Sites (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc.)

5. Info Pages (Squidoo, Hubpages)

6. Social Bookmarking

7. Blog Commenting

8. Bookmark Commenting

9. Link Farming

10. Link Exchanges

11. YouTube Commenting

12. Any Kind of Commenting

13. Video Sites (YouTube, BlipTV)

14. Forum Posting

15. Yahoo Answers

16. Google Buzz

<Yawn…> The list can go on and on. Basically any website that has any kind of form that allows you to post anything to the site can be used for backlinking. Now, the million dollar question: Which one(s) should I use? Beats me.

Just kidding, I won’t do that to you. Before I go into detail on my particular methods, I just want to state <deep breath>:

The owner(s) of this website does not necessarily agree with, condone, partake in, or in any other way support the beliefs or opinions of me. I do not guarantee, or even claim, that your results will be anywhere close to mine if you use these methods. I could have just been insanely lucky with my limited success. Furthermore, any success that is claimed by me may or may not actually exist. Honestly, who’s to say what success is these days? I mean even if you lose your shirt doing something, are you successful if you had fun doing it? Probably not… Wow, now I’m on a philosophy tangent… If you’re still reading this disclaimer, just know that I’m being as truthful as I can. I am really just trying to help others, and I am not wanting to sell anything here.

Blogging’s Not Heavy, Baby

So, down to biznass! OK, the most important method I use for building backlinks is blogging. Yep, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal, Blogsome, Blogetery, etc. are all very effective in building backlinks. Do I spam these sites? Absolutely not. If you attempt to spam these sites, your account will be disabled, your IP address will be banned, and your domain may be reported. Spamming is not smart marketing.

The reason I chose these sites is because they can all be automated. For clarification, automation and spamming are not the same thing. My method of automation is to spend the weekend writing content for the next week. I don’t use PLR articles, and I don’t rehash any of my articles. I utilize a program called BlogHatter to post to these sites remotely, either by XML-RPC or email. There are many other programs that will do this, some are scripts that need to be hosted on a server, others are desktop apps.

BlogHatter is a desktop app, and it is the cheapest of the best. I think I paid $47 for it, after the discount, and it lets you automate unlimited blogs. Basically if you find a site that can be posted to via XML-RPC or email, BlogHatter can automate it. For those that are familiar with BlogHatter, you might be wondering which version I have that allows posting to sites other than Blogger and Wordpress. Well, as long as you can post via email to a blog site, then BlogHatter will work. Why can’t I just use a free auto emailer? Well, you can, but BlogHatter has some awesome built in tools that make everything really easy. It uses ftp to store pictures on a server, so you can embed any pic you want. It will search for pictures and videos based on keyword, then insert them into your post. It can also help you schedule your posts with auto scheduling, and it can import text files.

To blog safely, I recommend only creating 3-5 blogs per account on these sites. I have seen people get reported by their competitors, and their whole blog network was shut down. Also, rotate your niches so that you aren’t blogging about the 3 same topics on all of your accounts. A good practice to use is to number your blogs and create little blog networks. Interlink the blogs in each network, but don’t link a blog from one network to a different network. You ultimately want these networks to be as independent as possible, to avoid any trouble. Also, you definitely do not want to post backlinks in every blog post. This will just work to devalue your links, and it also looks spammy. I try to limit my posts to every other day, but I have heard of people posting 5 times per day.

Social Bookmarking In Moderation

The next best method I use is social bookmarking. This is a very easy way to build some high quality backlinks in a pretty quick manner. Again, moderation is key. Digg, Delicious, StumleUpon, and the others are all very aware of their popularity. Use your head, less is sometimes more. My method for Digg is to create an account, Digg a few random pages from the most popular page, and post some comments. Now, the comments can have backlinks in them, so don’t be afraid to use them here. You just want to mask your intentions as much as possible. I might only Digg 1 of my sites for every 4 random Diggs I make. I also like to network about 5-10 of my accounts by “Friending” the accounts together. This way, I can Digg the submissions from the other accounts quickly. It also makes it appear that I have other intentions besides backlinks.

This is basically the method I use for all the bookmarking sites. The main points here are to keep moderation in mind, and to look as innocent as possible. A word about proxies: some sites, like Digg, keep tabs on the proxy urls that scripts like Hotspot Shield use. I can register under a proxy, but I can’t verify my account under proxy. I have yet to get banned on Digg, or any other site, so just keep this in mind.

Commenting Should Not Be Automated

The next method on my personal list is commenting in general. The sub header should be followed. Automated commenting is a complete waste of time. Honestly, one of the best ways to waste your time is to spend a good part of the day posting bogus, generic comments on blogs, bookmarking sites, and video sites. You, and your link (including domain) will be laughed right into obscurity. Always try to at least skim the other comments to get a feel for the conversation. Then just agree or disagree with somebody. You don’t even have to mention the post, just as long as your comment is relevant to the conversation. Now, there are black hat ways to do this. I don’t recommend them, obviously, but if you know them, and they work for you, then have fun with the money while it lasts.

I always comment on everything I read, whether it’s someone else’s bookmark, blog post, forum post, or even a comment. This should just be automatic. I always keep a notepad window opened right beside Firefox with a list of the urls I want to backlink to. My copy and paste functions are tied to F5 and F6, so it’s only a matter of seconds for me to include a url. I also keep a list of anchor text links too, just in case they are allowed.

A great way to go is to use the CommentLuv blog search, and spend a couple of hours a day commenting. Then, just mingle your commenting in with your bookmarking account creating and blog posting and you’ll have a vast number of backlinks in about a month.

BlogSolution For Advanced Linkers

Something that I’ve gotten into recently is building backlinks with BlogSolution. What this script does is automate the process of building blogs for you. You install the script on your site, and tell it whether to add blogs using either subdomains or folders. I personally use subdomains. It takes some additional setting up, and if you use GoDaddy you must have a dedicated IP address. You tell it how many blogs to make per day and how many posts to post. It can either post using RSS feeds or your own content. I use both, just to keep a good mix. Now, a couple of things to point out: you must make sure the domains you use for BlogSolution are on separate C class IP addresses. Also, private registration should be used to avoid someone killing your blogs with a Whois search. Also, to avoid being sandboxed, you should go for slow and steady link building. In fact, I never backlink for the first two weeks of any BlogSolution project. Then I add maybe 3 links every other day. Trust me, this will be worth the wait.

Tweetin On The Twitter

If any of you scoff at the idea of using Twitter for marketing and backlinking purposes, you’re an idiot. Just kidding, but seriously you’re stupid. I can literally send out a couple of tweets and get a decent amount of traffic immediately. Keep in mind, though, that I have 20 or so Twitter accounts, each with about 2,000 followers. This isn’t hard to do, and I’m honestly starting to add more accounts just because it’s so effective. I also use hashtags (#) in my money tweets. It’s not rocket science: just check what topics are trending, then include the hashtag phrase in your tweet. I’ve got to warn you that abuse of this will get your account banned pretty quickly. So definitely don’t hashtag every tweet, and don’t include a link in every tweet. I try to schedule my money tweets on each account about a minute apart, this way there will be a good clump of hashtag money tweets in the main and search timelines.

If any of this seems like a foreign language, then you might want to spend some time Googling Twitter marketing to learn more about it. There are plenty of sites that catalog tweets about trending topics, which is where your backlinks will come from. Other sites catalog retweets, so you can use multiple accounts to retweet your money tweets and build more backlinks. Don’t worry about pinging anything here, these catalog sites already do it.

Ping, You Idiot, Ping

One thing about all of this is that you have to ping. In order to get anything noticed in a decent amount of time, you have to let the search engines know that it’s out there. I have about 30 ping servers in my ping list, and I start the pinging every night before I crash. I use Social Bookmarking Demon for this, because you can set the amount of time in between pings. There are free tools that will do this, but I already own SBD, so I just use it. I have never used proxies to ping, and I have not been banned on the ping servers. Just always keep moderation in mind, and only try to ping once per day. Whenever I do anything involving a backlink, I copy and paste the url to another notepad window. This is how I keep track of what to ping. You’d be surprised how much you can get accomplished in a day, and trying to remember where all you were is impossible. I’ve actually posted 300 backlinks manually in a day. I pinged them that night, and actually saw them show up a couple of days later.

This brings me to another point: don’t freak out just because you don’t see your links in Google Webmasters, and never, ever try to find your links using the “link:” search query on Google! Your links are out there, and if you ping properly then they are doing their job. You should just focus on you search rankings and traffic. If you HAVE to know something about your backlinks, try checking websitegrader.com. Just keep in mind what I said earlier about the “www” in your backlinks. Your site might have different scores depending on what you actually submit for grading.