If you have bee around for any length of time online, then you know you need back links from a variety of places to rank your website on page 1 of the search engines. Yes, we all know that article marketing is still a great way to get content out there. Many of us also know the power of using software tools, like an article rewriter to help leverage our time and produce hundreds of unique versions of our content. In today’s article, I am outlining 3 additional and powerful ways to get great back links.
1. .Gov and .Edu Backlinks
Many people, including experienced internet marketers don’t realize the power of getting backlinks from .gov and .edu sites. Below, I have outlined the search method to find those golden little nuggets. Keep in mind, don’t spam those sites or any sites that you post comments on. The last thing you want happening is all of your hard work to be deleted.
Here’s how to search for them:
For .gov links, you have to do searches like:
For blogs
site:.gov “add comment”OR “post comment”
Forums
site:.gov “powered by vbulletin”
One final comment about .gov and .edu back links. The main reason they are so valuable is because you can’t buy them. Because of that main reason, the search engines give them incredible authority. A few back links from those sites can really help your SEO efforts.
2. Press Releases and Backlinks
Most of us know about submitting press releases and how they can go viral. Well, how about finding a way to avoid having to pay for any press releases, while at the same time being able to get hundreds or even thousands of back links? Yes, there is a really straight forward way that many people are missing out on. Read on to discover this highly effective, yet simple process.
Once you write your press release, do a Google search for free release sites. You will get back about 70K in results. Now go and sign up for about 30 free press release sites and submit your press release. Wait a minute, is that all you need to do? Yes and that’s the key. You can submit the same press release to all of those and let it go viral. The very nature of press releases are that they end up on dozens, hundreds or even thousands of different places. That’s the whole point of press releases.
You won’t get hit with the so called duplicate content penalty either, cause there is none despite what anyone tells you. The entire web is made up of duplicate content. If that were true, then thousands or tens of thousands of sites would disappear each day from the search engines.
The easy way to test this out is write up a press release, put your title in quotes and see what results you get in the search engines. You will not see instant results, but over the course of say 4 to 6 weeks you will see your results increase. If you don’t, then you didn’t tag it correctly in the title. The key is to use some generic terms in your title to maximize your results.
The search engines know the difference between an article and press release site by the way. One other little nugget here on press release sites. They have trust rank with the search engines. Many have been around for some time and get thousands of new articles added daily.
3. RSS Feeds
This is really one area that I think internet marketers are really missing out on some excellent back links. Most people just look at their home page RSS feed, but don’t really do much. Did you know, there are free and paid software programs out there that can make an RSS feed for each and every page?
It’s true and one free one is called Ice Rocket. You can sign up for a free account and create an RSS feed from any page or post. Why would you do that? Because you want dozens of new high quality back links. Many of the RSS feed directories and aggregators are trusted sites and because of that, the spiders hang out there all the time. So, when a new feed is added to the system, they know about it almost instantly and you get your information indexed.
Author Bio
If you would like more SEO tips, check out my site here: Article Rewriter – Darrell
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Great SEO tips Darrell. You are correct about duplicate content. There are many misconceptions regarding duplicate content.
Many people think that Google will penalize you if you have the same content on two DIFFERENT domains. This is NOT true, as Darrell pointed out in the press release example.
Nabeel
P.S.Typo in article:
“If you have bee (been) around for any length of time online”
Impressive, and I would be grateful if you can explain further on “press release”. Thanks
Hi Nabeel
Thanks for the comments. The more diverse we are in our seo link building, the better off we will be. I try for as many different locations and ways as possible.
@ sincere traveller:
The reason why press releases are so powerful is that that the search engines give good authority to those sites. As well, submitting your 1 press release to say 30 free press release sites can get your press release on hundreds or even thousands of other places because its a viral thing.
The best thing to do is create a press release about your topic, sign up for a couple of dozen free press release sites, submit the same one to all of them. Then put the title in quotes in Google to see how many search results come back. You will need to track how many results in quotes come back over a period of 4 or 5 weeks. That will give you the best idea at how effective your article was.
@darrel yeah there are quite a lot of article directories that easily approves prs
Hey Chris
That’s the beauty of these systems like press releases, they are free, yet have tremendous SEO value because of the quality back links you can get. For example, my buddy submitted a press release to 25 press release sites and now after 3 weeks, there are 1700 back links showing up. So you tell me if this is a good idea.
#1 is great. I use it to get more backlink . Thanks you
Hi Eseotips
Re: .Edu and .Gov
Absolutely its a great way to get some quality backlinks. The main thing really about getting back links is there are tens of thousands of places to literally get them and you will never get them all. Anyplace you can get a quality back link, go for it.
Press release and leaving comment in .gov or .edu site would be good way to build backlink. If you want to build quality backlink as well as branding your site, guest posting is the best way, as what you’re doing here Darrell.
Nice tips Darrell.
Regards,
Lee
Nice post for beginning link builders. However, your first point about .EDU and .GOV links getting special treatment at Google and most other search engines is a total myth.
Back in the late 1990s, early 2000s .EDU and .GOV sites were some of the few sites on the web that were really well linked and therefore typically had high PR. So links from them were very desireable and sought after… and actually obtainable.
Now there are millions of .COM, .ORG, and other top level domain sites that are equally well linked or in MANY cases better linked than most .EDU and .GOV sites. Getting a link on a .EDU or .GOV site that actually has even the slightest amount of PR is next to impossible today. There administrators know that people try to get links on their sites because of this myth. But unless you know the dean, a department head or someone pretty high up the food chain at a university or government agency, you will NOT get a link on their home page or any other major page like a departmental page. At best you might get a link on a student blog, but that will provide your site almost zero worthwhile authority or PageRank… definitely no more than a link on an equivalent .com, .org, .info, etc. blog. Getting a link from a student blog at Harvard wouldn’t benefit you any more than getting a followed comment link on some nobody’s blog.
Google does not treat a .EDU or .GOV site any differently than any other domain TLD. Matt Cutts at Google and countless other Googlers have confirmed this time and time again over the years. Their algorithm is TLD agnostic. Their algorithm could care less whether your domain has a .com, .org, .edu, .gov, etc. TLD and could care less whether the sites that link to you have .com, .org, .edu, .gov, etc as their TLD.
Here’s a video of Cutts explaining this yet again… He mentions it in passing earlier in the video by starts getting into it again around 1 min 50 seconds in.
http://www.youtube.com/v/UxTmZulcQZ0
I agree with you that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. A penalty would prevent your site from ranking well even though it should based on it’s overall ranking score… Google penalties typically prevent you from ranking any higher than some rough position like 30th, 60th, 350th, 950th, etc. depending on the degree of the violation of their guidelines even though without the penalty you might legitimately rank #1… which is why you’ll hear people say they were hit with -30 penalty, -60 penalty, -350 penalty, -950 penalty, etc.
Having duplicated content on your site simply makes it a tiny bit harder for the duplicate content to rank. Duplicate content can outrank original content and often does. Duplicate content can also rank in position #1 which would NOT happen if there were some sort of duplicate content “penalty”.
Google has over 200 ranking factors that they are looking at each time they rank a URL for a particular keyword phrase. These 200+ factors are each weighted differently. These weighted individual ranking factor scores are combined to come up with an overall ranking score which determines the URLs rank for that keyword phrase.
Some subset of those 200+ ranking factors are based on the content of the page. You can think of it as the duplicate copy of the page simply getting partial credit for the scores on the content-based ranking factors likely depending on how much of the page’s non-templated content is duplicated. The original content gets full credit for their scores on those content based ranking factors.
But duplicate content can easily outrank the original copy of the same content. All the duplicate content needs to do is to compensate for the low scores on the content based ranking factors by outranking the original on other non-content-based ranking factors.
For instance, the duplicate copy of the content might build more backlinks with better link text for the targeted keyword phrase. The duplicate’s title element and h1 elements might be better optimized. The domain authority and domain trust of the site where the duplicate content lives might be much higher than that of the origina content’s web site. All the duplicate has to do is score higher on some of the other non-content-based ranking factors such that their overall combined ranking score for that particular search phrase is higher than the overall combined ranking score of the original.
If a duplicate page and an original page with the same content had ALL ranking factors equal then the original would win.
Re; Jim’s Comments
I am impressed with your thorough response. Thank you for taking the time to give such a detailed response.
Jim you may think these are beginner link building methods and you may be right. But, they work and most people don’t even utilize those methods above. There are literally hundreds of ways to build back links. Some are more effective than others.
What would you consider to be advanced link building methods since we are on the topic?
Cheers
Again, thank you for your insights and perspectives.
Thanks Darrell…
Maybe it’s just me, but most unnatural link building techniques (press releases, article submission, directory submissions, RSS feeds, forum sigs, blog commenting, etc) where you “plant” links to your site on other web sites do not really require a lot of skill.
Write a press release with a link or two in it pointing back to your site, submit it to a bunch of free press releases distribution networks, and wait on people to repost the press release (and it’s links to your site) on their sites. Load a title, description, keyword, email address, and site URL into some software and have it submit your site to 1000s of free directories. Write an article containing links back to your site, submit it to sites like ezinearticles.com, and wait on other webmasters to republish your article (and it’s links to your site) on their web sites. Posting on forums with sig links back to your site. Spamming dofollow blogs with “Nice post..” type comments. It just doesn’t seem to take a lot of skill.
Yes, unnatural link building techniques like the ones above can all be effective; but generally they yield lots of low quality inbound links. And many of these types of links (blog comments, forum sigs, article submission, directory submission, press releases, etc.) suffer from a phenomenon where they provide a decent temporary boost, but their effectiveness fades over time as the post, thread, article, etc. fall deeper and deeper into the archives of the site. There’s nothing really difficult about these techniques even for a beginning link builder.
IMO getting high quality “natural” links (getting other webmasters to place links on their site pointing to your site) requires much more skill. I use the term “natural” loosely, because real natural links really only require writing great content and waiting… waiting… waiting… sometimes years for others to find it and link to it. I use the term “natural” links loosely to refer to any link that another webmaster puts on their site themselves pointing to your site (instead of you “planting” one there yourself).
Good link building doesn’t really require technical skills at all other than knowledge of a few simple things like the anchor element, nofollow vs. follow, and how to create good link text. The best link builders IMO are people with great marketing and sales skill sets. Quality link building requires being very creative, thinking out of the box, looking for unique opportunities, looking for unique angles to use to convince other webmasters to link to your site.
It starts with doing a LOT of research to identify websites that you want to link to your site. Many people looking for relevant sites to approach for one way links try to find other sites that rank for their targeted phrase and approach them for links. If they are your competitors, this is just not going to happen unless you are both local or regional businesses operating in different parts of the country, in which case you may get reciprocal links from them.
Rather than looking to competitor sites to link to you, spend time identifying complementary sites. By this I mean… look for sites that are not competitors but are in adjacent vertical that is somehow related to yours. This might mean looking to industries that might be suppliers for your business as well as to clients of your business (businesses upstream and downstream for your business). For a car dealership this might be body shops, glass repair sites, auto supply companies, mobile car wash companies, tire companies, etc. The car dealership doesn’t compete with those businesses, but they are very relevant to one another.
Once you’ve identified complementary vertical types, you might use Technorati to identify blog owners who are influencers in each of those complementary business verticals. Search BLOGS there for high level keyword phrases for each of those complementary sites.
You can use the Google SERPs to identify key sites in those complementary verticals that you might want to approach for a link.
Another way to get ideas for link sources is to do competitor back link analysis. Look at the URLs that are ranking in the top 5 or 10 for your targeted keyword phrases. Go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and look at the back links for those URLs by searching for link:www.example.com/some-url-that-ranks-no-1 if that is one of the URLs that rank. Their back links may give you ideas about other types of sites or verticals to look to for links.
The goal of all of this is to come up with a bunch of relevant (but not competing) sites to target for links. Now comes the hard part… Figuring out how to get a link from each of those sites. This is where the marketing/sales skills, creative thinking, etc. comes into play.
It might take weeks or even months before you manage to get the link you want from just one of these sites. But one quality link from one of these sites can be worth literally hundreds and hundreds of low quality links. The key is that each site you approach must feel giving you a link is a win-win situation. In other words, they WILL expect something (maybe tangible, maybe not) in return.
If you’ve identified blogs, you should participate in discussions there… like REALLY participate. No “nice post” comments. After you’ve established a relationship with the blogger and if they think highly of your responses, perhaps they’ll ask you to make a guest post sometime in the future. They get free content… You get to embed a link or two with your targeted keywords as the link text inside the post you write. Win-Win!
If you’re selling widgets, you may want to participate on blogs of influencers in those complementary verticals. Once you’ve gotten to know the blogger online, get his address and send him a sample widget. Ask him to evaluate it for you. You will likely not even have to ask for a link. Bloggers are always looking for things to blog about. You just gave him/her their next post topic… a review of your product. And they will almost certainly give you a link in their review. Win-Win!
If you’re promoting a vacation destination and have identified influencers in the travel industry, establish a relationship with them. Come up with ways to meet them in person. Have someone you both know introduce you. Find out when they are speaking at a conference and show up there to meet them. Get creative… Once you’ve have established a relationship with them, offer them a free weekend of accommodations at the hotel or timeshare you’re promoting in return for them writing a review of the place. Just make sure that you WOW them when they come. Win-Win!
If you’re promoting a site for a home builder and identified roofers, electricians, plumbers, etc. that you want to link to your site, tell them you’ll send them more of your business or refer them to other builders if they drop a link on their site pointing to your site with “your keyword phrase” as the link text. Win-Win!
If you’re promoting a finance news site perhaps you identified real estate sites as potential link sources. Maybe you can build a mortgage calculator widget that real estate sites can drop on their site to provide their visitors with a mortgage amortization calculator. The widget could have a link back to your site somewhere on it. Win-Win!
The list goes on…
The possibilities of how to get quality links from the sites you’ve identified are only limited by your creativity. But the theme is the same. Each link is likely going to require a slightly different approach. Establish a relationship with them. Get to know them. Impress them. Contribute. Then figure out some way to give them something that will make them want to link to your site.
Quality link building requires a lot of time and effort. But the rewards from an SEO perspective are far greater than those of low quality link building techniques.
If link builders aren’t making the mistake of approaching their competitors for links, many use the most ineffective technique on the planet: spamming webmasters with email begging for a link. I’m sorry, but this is not going to get you far. If you’re going to try this technique, at least spend time looking at each site, determine where you’d like your link, and in your email include information about the site (things you like, maybe a tip to tell them about how they can change it to rank better or to notfiy them of a broken link), and give them a reason that a link on their site to your site would benefit their site visitors. But emails bear little fruit.
Hi Jim
You raised some interesting points for sure. But, you indicated somehow that getting back links from places like Ezine Articles is unnatural type links or am I reading that incorrectly. If so, Ezine does get quality back links from my experience. So this is where you and I would disagree respectfully.
At any time, Google and the other search engines could quite easily devalue those links from Ezine, Press release sites etc., but they haven’t so far. Will they in the future? Perhaps, but I agree with a lot of your points, but honestly I didn’t make the rules of the internet to rank on page 1. The search engines make the rules and I follow them.
Your comment: “unnatural link building techniques (press releases, article submission, directory submissions, RSS feeds, forum sigs, blog commenting, etc) where you “plant” links to your site on other web sites do not really require a lot of skill.”
From the point that it is fairly easy to get links at the above places, yes I would agree. But, what is really considered unnatural to the search engines? The reason I bring this up is that the search engines could at any time, not provide any link value to the above places. In many instances, they have devalued links from certain places. I personally don’t see a problem getting links from the above places or them being unnatural.
On the other hand, I like to get links from all over and have found that that is the best strategy to look more natural in my humble opinion.
In an ideal world, yes even the digital world, we would only have the best of the best content and the rubbish would be deleted instantly. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. It would be nice if we wrote great content and webmasters lined up to get our content. The reality is that if you want to rank on page 1, you need to know what your competition is doing and then reverse engineer where their links came from. By doing that as you mentioned above, you will see which links Yahoo and Google see as worthwhile links.
I do some guest posting on high authority sites like this one and try and provide insights and perspectives from real life experience that will make a difference to the Internet Marketers out there.
I agree that commenting at forums and places like this site are fine, provided you are engaged in the conversation and not like you mentioned, “nice comments”. That doesn’t work for me either.
Make it a great day Jim
P.S. I was over at your site. You have some good quality content.
You didn’t misunderstand me. I did state that article submission to sites like EzineArticles.com is one unnatural link building technique just like blog commenting, forum sigs, directory submission, press releases, RSS feeds, etc. They are all methods to gain back links as a result of you planting a link on another site somehow. The webmaster at EzineArticles didn’t just decide to link to your site. You submitted an article that had embedded links in there to your site in order to gain back links. It’s an unnatural link building technique was all I said.
I never implied they were worthless. Nor did I imply that Google or any of the engines will look upon those links unfavorable (although they have devalued many directory links over the last 2-3 years). In fact I utilize all of the unnatural link building techniques above because I like diverse back link profiles. But I also go after real “natural links”. I simply said the above methods require little in the way of SEO or marketing skills and any beginner SEO could do it… which is absolutely true.
You asked me what I thought were advanced link building techniques. And I simply tried to explain, getting “natural” back links… i.e. getting other webmasters to link to you WITHOUT you having to plant a link on another site… requires much more in the way of SEO and marketing skills. Beginner SEOs have no clue how to build natural links. In fact most people who call themselves SEOs with years of experience have no clue how to do it. They try… usually fail miserably… and revert to unnatural link building because it’s a sure thing (even though the links are generally MUCH lower quality).
Think about it… To do article submission all you need is Microsoft Word and the ability to write a 250-400 word article that has correct spelling and grammar. Word will do that for you. You need to know how to put two links in your author bio with your targeted keyword phrase as the link text. I can teach my 66 year old mother to do all of that. Yes, if you want click-thrus from your article you should probably write a catchy, interesting, quality article… but you don’t “have” to and you will still get your two links with the desired link text.
And of the submission sites, EzineArticles is the best IMO. I use them to build back links to my blog sometimes. I’m a platinum author there. They gave me free platinum status after 10 articles. The links from there are okay but they are not all that great honestly. They have the same issues that most unnatural links have… their effectiveness fades over time. Not because Google just decides they don’t like the article anymore… But because of the nature of submission sites (and blogs, forums, directories, and other unnatural link sources.)l
When you submit an article and it is approved at EzineArticles, they might have it on their home page for a few hours, it will definitely be linked to on the category/subcategory’s “Recent Articles” page, and it will be linked to in the archives. So the article can give your site quite a boost initially. It’s a decent link because it has some powerful internal back links from pages at EzineArticles.
But when it rolls off the home page, it loses it’s most powerful link… BAM! It’s now passing your site much less juice. After other articles get submitted to that same category/subcategory your article will eventually drop of the category/subcategory “Recent Articles” page. BAM! The article is now passing your site even less link juice. Now your Article is only linked to from the submission site’s archive. If enough people submit articles to that category/subcategory, it may roll of the 1st page of the archive to the 2nd… and then the 3rd… and 4th… and so on… each time losing more and more juice. If the article didn’t receive any back links from other sites, it may eventually even get de-indexed at which point it becomes worthless from an SEO perspective.
This same phenomenon occurs for almost all natural link. With blogs your article is linked to initially form the home page, 1st page of the category, first page of the archive. It’s getting a lot of juice. So people commenting on it (if it’s a dofollow blog) will get lots of juice from their comment links. Then they post 10 more posts on the blog and it rolls off the home page. If there are 10 more posts in that month it rolls off the 1st archive page. If there are 10 post in that category it rolls off the 1st category page.
Same happens in forums and directories.
All I’m saying is unnatural links are easy to get, are generally low quality (pass little juice), and their effectiveness fades over time. Yes… you can make a page rank using these techniques. But if you stop building links your rankings will plummet pretty fast, in a matter of a few months if not weeks.
Natural links, specifically those from traditional web sites (non-blogs, non-forums, non-submission, non-directories) tend to be MUCH harder to get because a webmaster has to give you the link (you don’t plant it), they are generally higher quality links that pass more PR, and they don’t generally have the problem of their effectiveness fading over time.
If I own a finance site, I would rather have one link from a PR3 or PR4 article in LendingTree’s article section of their site (where I was Sr SEO Manager for 2.5 years) than to have 100 EzineArticles links, dofollow blog comment links, forum links and directory links. There is just absolutely no comparison. Once that link exists on a LendingTree article page it is there pretty much forever… And that page’s PR will RARELY change, only if they redesign the site and change their internal linking… LendingTree’s domain authority, domain trust and domain age will only get better with time.
I don’t mind unnatural links as a stopgap measure and to diversify a back link profile, but natural links are FAR better… even if it takes weeks or months to get just one good one.
Great discussion! I think we are saying a lot of the same things, just different ways. Having been SEO Manager for LendingTree I’ve seen a MUCH different side of SEO than most people who SEO smaller sites. It’s actually a much different world than SEO’ing a typical blog or small business site.
Have a great day!
3 great tips for sure. But there are so many different methods to get backlinks. I like to use as many as I possibly can get access to. Some are more effective in terms of ranking benefits, but they can all help over time. Using press releases is a great way to really get your information out there in a viral way to hundreds or even thousands of places from just posting a single press release. There are at least 25 plus free press release sites, so you don’t need to pay for them.
.gov and .edu are easy to find, but like Jim mentioned above, how effective are they really these days with all the sp** ing going on. Its debatable, but there are still some jewells out there that are untapped.
Making money online is about ranking on page 1. Its the best digital real estate on the internet, just like an ocean view property.
Thank you for giving us your tips or should i say thank you for sharing ideas on us it helps us a lot..
RSS Feeds and Blog Commenting is an effective SEO strategy
Very nice article, very helpful
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