Your Best Back Linking Opportunities are Right in Front of Your Face
I think that most of us make our lives way harder than they need to be. And getting back links is one of those things that can not only be frustrating but intensely boring. Finding them is one thing. Then there is the “work” of adding a link. Then finding another one…..add the link…and so on and so forth until you are ready to pull your hair out. And getting back links is a lot like taking a leap of faith off a cliff; you never know what is going to prove worthwhile and what isn’t.
But I say phoo-ey on that. Your best potential backlinks are actually right in front of your face. Let’s take a look at this and I am going to warn you right now….I won’t spell it out for you but I bet you will get it….
- Take a backlink inventory of what you already have- This can be guest posts, forum post, forum profile, comments you made on another person’s site, article directory links…whatever…..
- On a notepad or excel sheet, write down each site that is linking to you with the url where your link is on.
- Note the cache and pagerank of the site in question. Note the pagerank of the page your link is on… We will use pagerank as a starting point for authority. It doesn’t mean that they are trusted, but we can assume that a link on a PR6 site is probably more trusted than a PR0.
Now, instead of rushing out there and constantly searching for a new link, have you ever thought about building up the page that your link is on? Has it ever crossed your mind that if you have 900 links with the majority of them being PR n/a that if you built up all 900 links to a PR2, what kind of effect it would have on your ranking?
What would happen if you built a little ring of pages on hubpages pushing authority to end of the ring and then pointing the link at the end to that page which points ultimately to your page? (I say this because I know a lot of you have 100+ web properties at this time).
What would happen if half of those links wound up being a PR1 pointing to your site (that would be 450, by the way for the mathematically challenged)?
Wouldn’t that be a simpler solution that constantly hunting for new links with sites in different IP ranges that are thematically congruent with your theme?
Wouldn’t it be just as easy to go on a comment marketing binge to bring those pages up in link authority that would pass authority over to your site?
I may get more into this later in the week (how to build an easy solution for content to point to your sites pointing to you and where to find it, ect…). But for now, that is something to chew on for a second…..
7 Responses to “Your Best Back Linking Opportunities are Right in Front of Your Face”
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Building links to the pages that link to you is indeed a good way to build some authority. It works like charm, but seems that not everyone understands the important of such premium quality links and prefers thousands of low quality, partially index ones. If you correctly understand keyword research, finding a few strong links becomes a breeze since you are not required to get hundreds of them in order to rank.
Good food for thought Leo, this topic seems to be coming up recently. I’ve been doing this for one of my sites for the past month, and plan to roll it out to the rest of them once this test run proves a success.
I keep track of every link in excel, make sure they get indexed then try and point some support links to them. I’d be interested to see more of what you have to say on the topic…so look forward to the future post you mentioned.
What I’m looking at before I roll it out to other sites is finding what works best, comments, more articles, UAW, Bookmarks…as well as some other factors. I know there isn’t one perfect solution, and more is better.
Is this also correlate to what you are talking about when you refer to the straight arrow linking method?
@ Pete, Yeah…you can also repurpose content, change the title, change the links to have the search engines “rediscover” deeper & older pages, ect….ect… If you have 100 pages of content, that could easily turn into 400 links, if you know how to link AND more importantly who to use to build the link. But folks don’t think like this…they would rather hold on to old internet wive’s tales and believe what someone tells them rather than testing things out on their own.
It is a big problem for most who are new to the internet and making money online.
I knew the importance of strengthening your backlinks, but never thought this way. Your ROI example made it very clear and explained why it is smart choice. You are absolutely right about the link quality.
If I have an option to send out 2 links from a 2nd tier support article, is it a good idea to send one link to support page and 2nd one to the main money site? OR do you still stick with the pyramid structure?
@ Zeeray,
Typically, I will only use one link per article UNLESS I am simply trying to go for indexing a page. With things like EZA which don’t have much in the way of backlink benefits, I will use one link that is thematically relevant to the article. I still use the pyramid structure as my primary emphasis, but then again, I have a lot of content and pages to play with.
It is really funny because I was thinking about just this subject earlier today. I saw a video by Allyn Hayne a couple of weeks ago that has been going through my mind. In it he stalks about “stacking links”, which is essentially the same idea. When you see a link coming in organically then jump on it and send an ezine article or something similar to strengthen it. I’ve tried it on two of my keywords, both of which seem to have done really well, although in this game it is hard to ever know why one does well in the rankings in the short term.
My thinking was really around where one gets the greatest benefit and when one bumps into diminishing returns. If, for example, I’m writing an EZA it might make sense to send it to a site that has linked to me. The question then is what do I do with a second EZA and whether I am better off sending its link that site, or pointing it at mine.
Anyhow, thanks again for some useful brain food.
I guess it depends on the number of paid resources you have. Cause if you have bookmarking demon then it’s easy to strengthen those links! But if the link to your page is really week without a lot of unique sources of links pointing to it then yeah I would probably strengthen that link with new sources.