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Without a doubt, the most frequent post request I’ve had on this site is a post about link building. I rarely take requests, simply because people rarely know what they really want until you give it to them, but this time things are a little different.
First of all, I have been studying SEO day and night since I was 16 (almost 5 years ago) and I’ve ranked on the first page of Google for some of the most competitive keyphrases in the world. Therefore, I like to think I know quite a bit about the topic and can provide some insights in this space.
For those of you who don’t know why links are important, let me just say that if you want to get traffic from the major search engines, they’re crucial. Links from other sites to your site are basically a ‘vote’ that tell search engines you are trusted and you are a good resource for whatever your content is about.
A large percentage of my income to affiliate sites is from traffic via Google, and the difference between ranking 2nd and ranking 1st can literally be thousands of dollars extra on my bottom line.
SEO is generally divided into two parts: on-site optimisation and off-site optimisation. On-site is changes you make to the actual code of your website to help with rankings. In my guide on WordPress SEO I gave a lot of tips on this that you can also apply to sites that aren’t running the CMS.
Today we’re going to look at the off-site side of things, which is building links.
15 Ways to Build Links to Your Site
Instead of just telling you to do this or do that that many link building guides do, I also want to share a few principles that I believe are crucial in building a website that attracts thousands of high quality links. A few years ago you could take a robotic approach to SEO, but the web is now far too social to rely on old tactics to help your website rank higher.
Build a Site for People
I can’t remember who said this phrase but it’s one of my favourites: “search engines follow people.” Not only does following this motto steer you in the direction of build an honest, legitimate website, it’s also a very true way to get links to your site.
Have you noticed how Wikipedia absolutely dominates Google search results? I don’t believe they should be ranking for 50% of the phrases that they do, but Jimmy Wales built a site for people. It is a resource that millions of people naturally want to use, and because of that, people talk about them.
For a lot of competitive keyphrases online you’ll also find popular blogs, forums and niche social networks ranking highly. If you can get enough real people to care about what you’re doing, then you can’t go far wrong.
When people talk about you online, links follow.
Utilise Guest Posting
I talk about guest blogging a lot here but for good reason – it has lots of benefits. Not only does guest posting get you traffic from relevant websites, it’s also a great way to get links with custom anchor text around the keyphrases you want to rank for.
I have written a massive guide to guest blogging that tells you more about the practice, so read that for a detailed guide on how to get links through this process. To explain how this works in the most basic of forms, when you write articles (for free) for another website, they’re happy to give you a backlink in the byline in return for your content.
Be Useful
Pretty much every legitimate site on the Internet serves some useful purpose to it’s users. Facebook lets you keep in touch with friends and family. Google lets you find awesome websites. Digg lets you find news that you know hundreds of other people recommend. Youtube provides educational value, entertainment, product reviews and much more.
These are some high profile examples, but there are literally millions of useful sites online. This blog helps people leave the rat race and make a living online. PluginID helped people be who they want to be and deal with the issues that come up on the path to get there.
Ask yourself whether your site is helping people to fill a need. If it’s not, then why should people care about you? This might not sound great but everyone active online in any space online is generally just thinking about what’s in it for them.
If you can give people what they want, you can receive what you want.
Check Competitors Backlinks
When I talk about competitors, I simply mean people trying to rank for the same keywords / phrases as you in Google. For example, this site is “trying” to rank for the phrase viral marketing. I put trying in quotes as I’m only implementing a small number of these strategies as I’m not too bothered about ranking.
If I wanted to find great sources of links though, I could simply see which sites are ranking well for the phrase and where their links are coming from. As an example, a site ranking 2nd for me right now is a page on Wilson Web. If I take that URL and do a link search in Yahoo (they shows more backlinks than Google) I can find link sources I can also use:
The operator I use in Yahoo is simply “link:pageurl -site:domain.com” (no quotes) obviously changing the parts in bold for the site that is actually ranking for your keyphrase.
Check your competitors to see if there are freely available link sources that you can also get for your own site. After all, if they’re helping that site rank, they’ll probably help you.
Leave Blog Comments
Most blog comments are nofollowed (this means search engines aren’t supposed to give weight to the link, though I believe Yahoo and Bing still do) so they don’t provide much link juice directly. There is a resource for dofollow blogs where you can leave comments that give link weight, but many of them get spammed and there will only be a few that are relevant to your niche.
I like using blog comments as an indirect way to get links back to your site. For example, if I contact a big blogger out of the blue and ask them to link to my latest article, it’s probably not going to happen. Yet, if I’ve spent some time interacting with their community and leaving comments, it’s more likely that they will fulfil the request (as long as your resource is relevant, and awesome).
Blog comments also drive visitors to your site, which goes back to the point of search engines following people.
Check Flippa Auctions
One of my favourite ways to find awesome sources for links is to check the Flippa marketplace. Flippa is a place for people to buy and sell websites and has a very interactive community. Even if you’re not looking to buy or sell sites though, it can be a great way to find links.
If you take the time to look around, you’ll find a number of repeat sellers who are selling websites that have ranked well in Google very quickly. In some cases, these sites are ranking for phrases that bring in thousands of dollars, just in a few short months.
Looking at these sites and finding where their backlinks are coming from has provided me with a lot of easy-to-duplicate tactics and links that Google clearly love.
Write Awesome Content
A few years ago you could write an awesome post and it would receive hundreds of links. Look at the trackbacks on old Copyblogger or Steve Pavlina posts and you’ll see what I’m talking about. With the introduction of Twitter and sites like StumbleUpon, people are more inclined to ‘share’ sites, rather than link to them from their own blogs.
The amount of links you can get for awesome content has definitely decreased, but by no means has it stopped. My post on WordPress SEO picked up a lot of blog links and is getting new ones all the time. My friend Danny also noticed the decrease in bloggers linking out and started a mini-campaign about it.
“Awesome” content means a lot of different things to different people. In terms of this site, it might be a great resource post. For a humor blog, it may be a funny image. For your Gadget blog, it may be announcing a new product before anyone else.
If you know your niche well enough, you should know what people want.
Participate on Social Bookmarking Sites
I really don’t like this tactic if I’m honest, but I can’t deny that social bookmarking links are helping a number of my sites rank. Bookmarking sites like Delicious simply give people a place to store their favourite links an organisable archive, which is generally far more useful than your browsers bookmark bar.
They’re also available from any computer anywhere in the world, so a lot of these sites have popped up due to their usefulness. Many of these sites offer dofollow links and custom anchor text, although they aren’t the best links in the world to pick up.
You can automate the process using something like Bookmarking Demon (not an affiliate link – none of those here) or you can even pay someone on Digitalpoint to submit to hundreds of sites manually.
To utilise this tactic in a more ethical manner, simply sign-up on a few sites you really want to use and bookmark your favourite links from around the web. Just don’t forget to link to your own site as well.
Add Links to Your Forum Signatures
Unlike blogs where you get nofollow links for contributing to the discussion, most forums allow you to have a (followed) link in your signature, every time you make a post. If you’re already active on some communities online, see if you can put a link in your signature.
I really don’t recommend you sign up on lots of sites just to get links, but if there are sites that you’re really interested in and want to participate, then link back to your site. Note that if you have 10,000 posts on a forum already and add a link there, that’s not going to be anywhere near as powerful as 10,000 links where each is from a different site.
It’s far better to have links from different domains, rather than lots from the same source.
Utilise Free Content Sites
Another link source that I don’t really love but I see doing well for a lot of sites is utilising free content sites like Squidoo, Gather and Hubpages. These sites basically allow you to sign-up, write about whatever you please, and link to yourself however you want.
Hubpages is very unpoliced and they’ll basically allow anything to stay on their site, but Squidoo (owned by Seth Godin) recently removed thousands of spammy pages from their site and are constantly policing them.
If you are going to use sites like this, at least take the time to to create a good resource for users, rather than just throwing links to all of your sites in there. Not only will that make your link more valuable (more relelvant and on a page with lots of content) but its better for these communities.
Use Article Directories
A much better source of links if you want to receive them in return for your content is using article directories. There are a lot of awful, highly spammed directories out there, but there are definitely a few worth looking for.
My favourites include Ezine articles, Article Dashboard and Go Articles. Ezine and a number of other sites review articles manually first so you’re not going to be able to spam them (which you shouldn’t want to, anyway). However, if you write good content, or pay someone else to, then you can get a great link in return.
Ezine is definitely the most trusted and you’ll actually find the page you write the article on can rank quite well, quite quickly. Once you’ve inserted your article content, you’re given the opportunity to fill in an Author Box and you can put your links in there.
Collaborate with Influencers
Some of the most popular posts on PluginID were the ones where I collaborated with other influences in the personal development niche. Examples include the Face-Off series that I ran and times where I would ask the same question to multiple people.
If your idea is unique and interesting, you’ll find that the people involved are often happy to share the piece via social media sites and even link to it from their own blogs.
Interview Someone Important
Similar to the last idea, interviewing someone in your industry or someone high profile is likely to get you a lot of attention. There are two ways to gain links via this method.
First of all, you can interview people who you hope will link back to the interview from their own sites. Or, you can utilise your connections (or hustle, hard) and interview someone the average person couldn’t get to answer their questions.
I personally tried to interview Eckhart Tolle (an author who has been featured on Oprah and sold millions of books) but didn’t get very far. If I had managed to land the interview though, I know a lot of people would have linked to it naturally.
Design a Unique, Beautiful Site
There are many ways to have a good looking website. I personally like to buy templates from the likes of Theme Forest and customise them heavily (like I did with ViperChill). You could also hire a designer like Reese to create something custom that looks amazing.
Once you have a beautiful site in place, there are literally thousands of link opportunities. “Where?” I hear you ask. “CSS and design directories”, is my answer. There are tons of sites which showcase beautiful designs and offer a link to the site so people can view the real thing, rather than a screenshot or thumbnail.
Many of these have a lot of authority in Google so if you want to find some, here’s a good place to start.
Create a Great Resource
There are a number of personal development bloggers giving sitewide (links from every page) links to PluginID because I created an amazing resource. That resource was a list of top blogs in my industry, but yours doesn’t have to be the same.
Can you create a free eBook that answers a need? What about a resource on 101 ways to do ‘X’? How about a list of other sites which offer great advice on a popular topic? Think about something that you know your readers would want but would take a lot of work for you to put together.
That’s the resource you should be creating.
What Not To Do
Now that we’ve covered some of my favourite ways to get links to a site, I quickly want to run through some things you shouldn’t be doing. While search engines generally reward sites with a lot of links by giving them high rankings, there’s also a few things they don’t like.
Remember: search engines want to show the best results to their users. If you’re manipulating link counts heavily and don’t really deserve to rank for your phrase, then they don’t want you to.
Here are a few things to watch out for:
- Building Links too Fast – Build links very quickly is usually unnatural. There may be times where write a post that gets hundreds of links overnight and that’s not going to penalise you, but just be careful about building too many links for your site as a whole. I’m not a search engine, so I can’t give exact numbers, but if you think you might be going a bit over the top, then you probably are.
- Using Spammy Resources – Not all links are created equal. It would be far more powerful for ViperChill to have a homepage link from Problogger than it would be to have a link from Hubpages or an automated link farm. You can’t control who links to you, but just be careful where you focus your link building time.
- Taking Part in Link Exchanges – If you want to add sites to your blogroll or resources page then add them, but don’t just do it because people are linking to you. Link exchanges worked well about 2 years ago, but are a very dated technique that search engines are well aware of.
- Building Links Around One Phrase – You might have a phrase that you want to rank for and the best way to do that is to get links with that phrase as an anchor text, but only having links with that phrase is very unnatural. Most links help your rankings in general, so don’t be afraid to get links for different phrases or even your domain as a whole, like http://www.viperchill.com
If you have any of your own ways to build links that are working well, I would love to hear them in the comments.
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Excellent article as always.
Merci Beaucoup
Great article! I specially liked the part where you say “build a site for people”
Although you need to tweak some aspects of your SEO and other setups, if you write great content the rankings will come.
This is an example of great content and I’m sure the back links will reflect it.
Thanks!
Sincerely,
Evelio P.
Lifechitect.com
I’m definitely putting a link to this from my writing blog. This is very useful indeed. As an aside, I think my blog is in 10th position for Viperchill on Google. This is odd, something I never expected. I think this stems from the fact that I run a follow friday – blog style and once featured this blog.
Thanks again for these tips.
Hey Anne, thanks!
That’s funny, I see you 12th over here in South Africa (which is still high). Title tags play a massive role in relevance and rankings.
You’re welcome, thanks for the comment
Killer article Glen. I love that it’s not only in depth but doesn’t call for unethical tactics as well.
Personally I liked the section on guest posting as well as writing awesome content. I feel if you can do both of those, the rest will take care of itself.
Bud!
Your first ever comment here. What is going on?!?
Great point. You definitely don’t need to implement all of these to be successful. Many of them will also apply to different sites. For example, it’s unlikely you can get a clear, sales-page affiliate site in a CSS gallery unless it is out of this world.
Hopefully people will use the ones that resonate with them the most
So true, I feel like guest posting still has a lot of value left, and will be one of the few tactics that will remain viable after Google cracks down with these ‘Panda’ updates.
Great article! I’ve been pondering how to better rank on google and build links. I am new to this, and you have definitely created a great read on the subject. I’ve still got to learn how to use these backlinks and keyword tools. I’ll be working on these strategies for a while.
Hey Colby,
Thanks a lot, bro. Let me know how you get on!
Hi Glen,
I appreciate that you’re using your 5 years of study and condensing it here in one place. I have been making a study of your articles and yours is one of the few blogs where I actually take (real pencil to paper) notes!
In my case, there is no concern for building links too fast — I have enough to keep me busy, learn and implement.
Cheers,
Kim
Hey Kim,
Thanks, that means a lot to me!
I have a few friends IRL who I think might have been building there links too fast so thought it would be a good idea to include that. Obviously it’s not for everyone, but just a precaution
Thanks for your comment, as always!
Heya Glen!
Awesome post, this is one topic that I have really been wanting to know more about since it plays a big part in mini sites and affiliate sites
Seriously thanks for writing these posts! I’m sure this one is going to get you a lot of links too!
Ciao!
D
Hey man,
Surprised your still OK with commenting here after owning you on TopSpin
Hahah, j/k.
You’re welcome buddy.
Thanks for this Glen. I’ve been looking for more information on how to build backlinks. Bookmarked
Awesome Jacob, thanks
Great Idea about checking the sites on Flippa for back links, I’m on there all the time looking for ideas but never thought to take it a step further and see how they got their link. Thanks!
Thanks Brian,
You could also do the same with Marketplaces on Digitalpoint and Website Broker, but Flippa definitely has the best sites.
great article!! let me add 2 more if you don’t mind. 3 way link and link wheel…
what are 3 way link and link wheel
Great ideas and great links. I will definitely look into some of these resources. I never thought about checking out competitors back links. Smart!
I do have one question. Why is it necessary to leave (not an affiliate link – none of those here) in your article? Is it taboo? Do you think it will chase other bloggers away? If they like the info you give them, what’s wrong with getting commission? Just curious.
JS,
I’m pretty sure I’m the only blogger in this industry who doesn’t post affiliate links and there are blogs a lot bigger than mine. I don’t think there are many issues with it.
It simply doesn’t align with me personally as I a) don’t need the money and b) don’t want people to think I’m only recommending something for a commission.
I make my living with affiliate marketing, so I have nothing against it
Okay, I get that. But why point it out?
Because I like to?
Maybe it doesn’t resonate with you because you want to post them yourself.
It was only a question. Sorry!
Sorry if my replies came across as stubborn, that was not meant to be the case.
I sent you an email
Hi Glen,
This is why you rock. Such an awesome article! Sharing it with my list now in 3…2…1
Thanks Scott.
Leaving a comment here means you rock too
The feedback from my list has been uber-positive. The content you write here is some of the best free information I have seen in a long time on any marketing/internet blog. The amount of golden nuggets you give for free is just awesome.
Keep up the good work and I look forward to hearing more about your $1M website project.
I’m interested, with great resources like this, whats your personal opinion on spending money on SEO books and guides? Do they really reveal stuff that you don’t talk about?
The only book I would ever recommend for SEO was from SEOBook.com but it’s no longer available unless you sign-up for a $200 per month membership site.
There is more to learn, but not much more that I think is necessary.
Awesome article and now I’ll have to check out Flippa and start using Yahoo again to study backlinks. Thanks for the renewed energy.
Glen, your posts are works of art.
I can’t agree more with the need to understand principles rather than simply going by instructions or digging up tips to follow.
Some new ideas for me in this post. Thanks!
I’ve never heard that one but thank you, Haider
Your support has been awesome over the last few weeks!
[...] How to Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google, ViperChill [...]
Awesome post Glen! I don’t know if you remember me, but I was the guy that read your post in the parking lot on How I Really Built a Blog with 6,500 Subscribers which had a link about guest posting. Since then, I’ve overcome my fear of doing guest posts and have written 4. One of them just came out on 6 Aliens and the other one will come out on Change Your Thoughts in March. I think this will help me build some back links. Thanks for helping me out me get out of my discomfort zone.
Hey Hulbert,
I remember – although I”m pretty sure you’ve changed your gravatar
That is so awesome!! Thanks for sharing. You’re very welcome.
Hi Glen,
A tremendous resource for link-building. I’m partial to guest posting and commenting on other’s blogs. Content creation trumps all though. If you write stuff that provides great value you’ll receive plenty of links.
Ha – just starting a new site and was pondering the best strategies for links. I’ve found Ezine Articles a good source of traffic too.
This is just what I needed. Very good, honest advice. I’ve bookmarked.
Cheers dude. Boom!
Thanks Carl!
Glen – my favorite “Personal Development & Viral Marketing Guru”,
As usual, another of your honest, to the point and inspirational posts. I’ve been learning a ton from you and your experiences which you so generously share with the rest of us. Thank you. I always take into consideration the advice you give and try my best to implement whatever I can (in my blog). Good luck with all your current and future endeavors.
How many of those do you have, Ingrid?
Thanks a lot for all of your support. Best of luck to you, too!
Hey there,
Thanks for the reply. In response to your question – I’d like to think that I have or am close to having 4 of them. But like you said – awesome content means different things to different people. But so far, the feedback I’ve been getting from viewers has been rather positive. However, there is always room for growth and improvement and I’m working on both!
I recently had my site retouched to better reflect the style and personality of the blog in general. It’s still being worked on and should hopefully be done by late next week. Still using a WordPress theme so it’s a small makeover for now but to me – already an improvement.
At the moment, I’m in the process of preparing “ask the same question to multiple people” – but still needs some time.
I haven’t guest posted on a site yet – but I have been asked by a decent size (45,000+ unique visitors p/mth) website (which targets mostly my region) if I would be willing to have 1 or 2 of my posts appear weekly on their site – they would of course include my name as well as a direct link to nittyGriddy.com. What do you think? I was thinking it may be a good idea. Your advice on this would be – as usual – greatly appreciated. Thanks. Ciao:)
I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t at least give it a try
Just write for them once and see if you think it’s worth writing there regularly.
Thanks a lot Glen
I think I may just do that – after all, they’re just gonna’ take what I’ve already written on my site and publish it on theirs – the way it is.
Cheers
Ah, another post at ViperChill. Time to put the kettle on and settle down with a nice cuppa and try to take it all in. I agree there’s lots of handy info here and people should be writing it down. I personally have added a few things from here to my to do list on NetVibes – huh, I think you recommend that to me to. Might be turning into a Glenbot…
Anyway, nothing much to add except that I will try to mix up the links name. So where the active link tends to be to my blog name (Get In the Hot Spot) I have tried to get people to link to a key word (eg. personal development blog) but should also consider using the actual domain name (www.xyz.com) Am I getting this right?
Also feedback on “not an affilate link” I appreciate that. Mainly because I was looking for an email newsletter solution and most of the big names recommend Aweber but then I started to wonder if they only recommended it because they get a kickback from it. It kind of turned me of Aweber and made me a bit suspicious about why people recommend things so I think you’re doing the right thing there.
Gracias amigo:)
Hey Annabel,
I’m building up an army of Glenbots. Just be wary of what I ask you to do next
Yep, the way you are doing things seems fine.
P.S. I love Aweber, it is a great service if you want to use one in the space.
De nada
Great info Glen as par for you. As I slowly move into understanding more and more about the SEO I can see why you have been so interested by it and why its so hard for many of us to master. It is very complicated and seems to change. Most business people are used to having those set rules about what to do and why. It seems to me that SEO is much more fluid and that is hard to understand for a lot of people. You make it sound easy though. I’ll find out in a few months as I keep listening to the advice you give and see if I can learn.
Gracias Amigo!
Hey Glen, I read some of your stuffs on PluginID for a while back and followed you here to Viperchill. You have lots of great content here! Thanks so much. This definitely serves as a great checklist for us who are looking into SEO. I haven’t gone too detailed into SEO myself although I do use the all in one SEO plugin, instead I focus on writing great content and building relationship with people. I figured I wouldn’t have enough time to tweak all the stuffs, as long as I can focus on the most important parts I’ll be on a good track.
Having said that, I’ve been more conscious about SEO lately for some reasons and had been doing more to make sure my stuffs are more search engine friendly. So this is a wonderful refresher list.
Thanks!
Great info Glen and an interesting way to use Flippa for backlink research. You can narrow down the sites you’re look at by using the advance search functionality. Try refining your search by adding in PageRanks of 2 or more and age of 3-9 months.
Excellent addition Luke, thanks for sharing.
Awesome to see you over here
Every couple of years – and even less nowadays – its good to reevaluate what works and what doesn’t in all aspects of SEO. Some things will remain true like title tags and backlink analysis but other things will fall off as the engines evolve – meta keywords and recip links. I define a good post as one that gets the ideas peculating long before your done reading, thanks, I really enjoyed your post!
Great Info Glen, I have been working on my click bank mini sites and have actually made a sale but just mainly from forum traffic, I really need to keep building good links so I can get more daily traffic without having to force it..
Hi Glenn,
I’m a big fan of guest posting for generating juicy backlinks. I started a squidoo page the other day. I liked the freedom to pop links on, but I haven’t taken the time to think about how to promote it or what I might gain from promoting it. I just submitted two articles to ezine earning a nice backlink. Next, I’ll have a look at checking competitor’s backlinks. I’m focused on links right now. This post comes in handy. Thank you!
Writing Quality & Useful contents is the No.1 way to build back links. But bloggers ignore this and try to use all other techniques you have mentioned. I can figure out why people ignore the main reason but follow other ways. The reason is they want to get backlinks from outside resources but not trying from their inside resources. That means they don’t want to use their brains to offer useful content but they are using their brains to get backlinks from other brains.
Glen, I really love your first paragraph more than other paragraphs in this post. Really people don’t know what they need and want.
I’m starting a new website with the cloud living model with a friend, and we were thinking about making hundreds of links from ezine articles and other article directories. We also want to try to build a useful site because I google naturally wants to show the best results. Now that I read this article I will try other technique as well. Great post.
Thanks Oscar,
Guest post links are far better than article directories IMO, so if you can get links for your content from those instead, then I would. But, like you say, there are a lot of other tactics out there to be used.
Oh man!!!! Glen!
I’ve been making such a noob error!
Almost all my main affiliate sites’ backlinks’
anchor text are for my main keyword phrase.
Doh!
Here I’ve spent over 300 hours
building links to my site and just making
the bottom of the first page of Google.
However, another page on my site
is already on page 2 with way less links.
But these links’ anchor texts are for various
related keywords. How basic. I’m sure I’ve
read this somewhere too. This is so key.
Doh again!
I was thinking I’d need a year on
each site to rank in Google at this rate.
I may make enough to buy lunch in 2030. LOL
Oh, and thanks for the help on Facebook!
You’re the man.
Hey man,
This is one of the reasons I’m working on a Cloud Living update. There are quite a few things that I want to make sure people are (or aren’t in this case) doing.
Don’t stress about it though. Just go easy on that site for a few weeks.
Glen, that was absolutely informative and to the point with great tips. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Glen,
Thanks for the great content, you’ve really provided some really great insights and tips. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on video, as you don’t specifically mention it, and how that could be also used to lift your search rankings.
Thanks again,
Gus
Thnx Glen! Another brilliant linkbuilding article. …enough tips to keep every linkbuilder busy for years
Hi,
I’ve been very interested in SEO for a while and have been learning every second i get to learn new techniques.
Thanks a lot for this entry! it was AWESOME!!
Bookmarked!!!!
Thanks again!
Great informative post, Glen. Building backlinks is a must, and is something almost every blogger has to work at till they reach that magical tipping point where traffic to their site is automatic.
I would also include in your list the need to be patient. Building traffic to your blog doesn’t happen over night. For some, it seems like it does; but for the majority of blogs, it doesn’t. Stay focused and practice what Glen lays out here and you’ll reach your blog’s “magical tipping point” sooner rather than later.
Wesley Craig Green
Hi Glen,
Great compilation of link building tactics. We just released an ebook called “An SEO Insiders Guide to Finding (an obtaining) Free High Quality Backlinks” for those that sign up for our newsletter. Many of the tactics you mention are in the ebook, however there are a few additional ones.
Keep the great posts coming!
Thanks,
Tyler Stample
Hi Glen,
gr8 post, very useful to learners
Thanks,
Sri
Hi there Glen,
Great article, really liked the depth that you provided. Building links in my experience can be a long and arduous task, the more support and help we can get the better.
Have a good day.
M
Hi Glen,
Good post, its so nice to see honest SEO techniques that are not spammy. I completely agree with you, link building is not just done in a month and I think as long as you are a serious business, playing by the books Google is going to take a liking to it. Like anything in life, if you want something then you have to work hard for it.
Thanks
Louise
Hi, great post. I manage our Multilingual SEO and this is a bit of fresh air. Its great to have clean professional non-spammy pages, that help clients get what the really want. We certainly try to offer something of real value to our visitors.
I’d add when we author I always ask – when would anyone visit this page. If I can’t answer it then I delete the page. This makes us focus on the core, valuable content people are after.
Cheers
Damian
Great post Glen, easy reading and some great tips particularly to someone starting out in the industry not knowing where to go in an ever increasingly competitive channel
Hi all
Thank you for this article and all the coments all togethermakes it into a must read for ethical link building. We are using vertical-blogger.com what do you think about this practise?
Regards
rafa
[...] Getting Inbound Links – there are many decent link building guides and this is one the best – 15 ways to build links to your site, including the clever idea of building links by monitoring those sites up for auction [...]
Great post Glen, very exhaustive, including post & site backlinks strategies
My main concern these days is a bit different: How to get the most of seo/backlinks in the minimum number of hours. As a blogger I guess we all share the same concerns, get the maximum return of every hours we spend on our project.
So i have a question for you. If you had only 60 minutes to spent for:
* writing a post
* optimised that post for a keyword (that means keyword research & on-page)
* post promotion
what would you do ?
Might be a good excercise for another post
Well, I would never only have 60 minutes, but I would spend it writing a post. Either for my site, or someone else’s.
I think I have wrote about 3 posts in the last 2 years (out of 200) that were aimed at getting SE traffic. On-site optimisation is something you can generally do once, and then leave it for the most part.
If you do no keyword research before writting your post, then I guess web 2.0 backlinks building has no secrets for you.
It’s pretty impressive how fast you can rank that high. Apart from that your content is great so you will rank high long time too.
Congrats
Yes, don’t underestimate the power of social media. But I notice that well thought content is getting more trust from Google.
Thanks for the tips, very useful and well explained.
All great tips. and mostly free ways to get BL’s. very cool.
Always nice when someone shares the tricks of the trade. Thanks a bunch for this superb article, off now to check out the Google SEO article to brush up on some skillz.
Have you considered writing an article on how to figure out the quality of the site that is providing the backlink or would it be too short for your liking? : ) Or is it as easy as just seeing where they rank on google, alexa, etc. and combining this with common sense?
Generally I look for whether:
– it is relevant
– it has a lot of links pointing to it
– it isn’t linking out to irrelevant or spammy sources
I hope that helps.
Glen,
Thank you so much for this.
I must admit, that the information you provided here, are very precious to me. I never seen something so clear said about building rank. I found your post very useful and I believe that it will help many people including me, to understand how search engine works.
Once again, thanks for posting it…
Regards,
Ioan
[...] long winter days seem to have kept quite a few folks inside, considering the large amount of great in-depth link building articles I came across last month. When even Bing starts writing about link spam, you [...]
This is a good arcticle about this theme. I started a new site und your tips are very helpfull.
[...] How to Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google [...]
I could use some advise. I am building a community website for a niche hobby that I will then use to market related affiliate products too. I am about to start marketing and I’m a bit lost on if I should first market to people with just information, in order to build my email list/followers, or if I should market to potential buyers of the affiliate products (keywords that lead to buying rather then information?)
Also when contacting potential websites (not blogs, so I can’t guest post) what are some ideas that would encourage them to write something or link to my site?
Thanks for your help. This is my first visit here and I am sold on your honestly and quality help and information.
Hey Glen,
Can you please do a post listing all of the sites you’ve guest posted on in the past few months? I’ve seen you on Copyblogger, MaxBlogPress, etc. I’m building a master list of sites that accept guest contributions like:
-Mercola.com
-About.com
-LifeHack.org
-DumbLittleMan.com
-SeekingAlpha.com
Kim Roach had an awesome podcast called 10x Content Marketing (or something like that) and it listed a ton of ways to share content also.
Your readers would love something like this.
Best,
Raza
[...] importance of on page optimisation, this article concentrates on strategies you can implement to build links to your site, otherwise known as the off site side of things. The article emphasises the need to provide [...]
I’d love to try Bookmarking demon but I use a mac. Anyone know of any alternatives that work on a mac?
Great article. There’s a lot of information talked about here which I haven’t heard anywhere else. Thank you very much.
The Steps which has worked well for me are
1. Online Profiles where I can place a link to my site and if I participate on the website my profile page gets really good PR as well.
2. Reviews and testimonials on products I prefer and use and they are published on the website with a link to my site.
Both helps me get good links to my site.
Thanks
Shabbir
Remember: Don’t spam forums! Earn the “right” to get a clean link by creating good posts!
Hi Glen, Great Post, I am a new reader and and am working my through all your posts! With building links, you mention, building links too fast can be bad…I am just wondering, would building 50 or so links for a new site a month be too much?
Hey Glen,
Thanks so much for your excellent content. I am one of your readers for almost a year now – but because of rss I am not that likely to leave comments
Anyways because of you I started to get into affiliate marketing and try to dominate google. When I look at analytics I have following traffic composition: 9.66% search engine, 82.77 reffereingsites and 7.56% direct traffic.
I am wondering how to increase the search engine term since when I got it rigt is the key to success?? Backlinking seems not to work as it should. Any tipps???
Cheers Sebastian
Promoting a product that helps you build backlinks and asking me how to do may be one place you’re going wrong
Note to self: Give away less.
Where is your referring traffic coming from? How old is the site?
The Yahoo trick is a real killer that I use extensively. Also another tip worth mentioning is to search through Google for the keyword phrase you are trying to target and go through the top 50 or so sites looking for any ways you can get a link from them. Works well for me.
Hi Glen,
Is ‘Bookmarking Demon’ worth buying ?
And most important would the promoted site not be banned by Google because of its use ?
“To utilise this tactic in a more ethical manner” So using it is not ethical I gather.
I just launched my site and link building is something I have really been trying to figure out. It is a lot tougher than I thought, but from everything I have read, it seems that it just takes time and you need to keep creating killer content. I am glad I bookmarked this page, so that I could refer back to this article. Thanks a lot for being some helpful and informative.
Have heard a lot of good things about your website on Twitter. Your blog/article entries come highly recommended. I really enjoyed this piece on link building and when i get some more time i plan to read more of your content. I do believe a lot of people put too much focus on one or two core keywords when link building so i am glad you made a good point about spreading the range of keywords that are targeted
Another killer link building tool is creating infographics. These lead to highly editorial links and can get 100′s or even 1000′s of links at a time. Check out http://www.chartporn.org to see what I mean. There are some amazing data visualizations there.
Kudos…very informative. I’ve heard alot about your methods and absolutely want more. Awesome work!
Its a great post i think and will help most of us bloggers who are looking for the great help out there on net. Thanks for the great post and have a great reader ship…
Glen – This is a great post. I’ve been having the problem whee i’ve got great content but nobody knows about it. It’s beginning to change now and traffic is picking up – but your tips are very useful. Very interesting site you have – with some great posts.
Hey there Glen,
I stumbled here from another SEO expert blogpost on the subject “Must read blog list”.
When i read the post, i relized why. Great stuff I must say.
I would like to add that OnlyWire might help on Social Bookmarking, it sure haven’t 100 places installed but hey, it’s a free service right and free is good
B.
Glen,
Excellent post and great list. I love this list and try my best to follow your tips.
Thanks,
Hussain
I agree about building a site for people. It creates more value that way. And where there’s value, everything else (traffic, money, etc.) will just follow. =)
Thank you Glen – I like the Flippa comment in the comments too – just off to check that out.
Very good post, i love your blog! xD
You write very good quality articles, i very like to read them and there are very useful also.
So fast, my site is only one moth old and i have already get 6k backlinks.
How? I didn’t do anything dirty to get these links, i have just write comment on dofollow blog which have top commentators plugin, i hope that searchs engines won’t think that i’m doing “weird” thing? o_O
Thank you so much. I just like the “what we not to do” part. This is something exceptional and good tutorial.
Thank you. As yhou can imagine, I do NOT want to engage in “black hat” SEO for my new site. It is annoying, though, when Google and Yahoo list my site…and rank it pretty high…when Bing won’t show my site even if I type in my precise website url. Arrrghhh! The Bing forum just tells me to be patient and build backlinks. I appreciate your approach to building backlinks!
Bing has a tiny marketshare right now so I wouldn’t worry about them too much. They are very slow to pick up backlinks + new pages in my experience.
Thanks for the comment!
Why has it taken me so long to find you – great stuff…many thanks. Just need to apply it all and find time for a life and a business!
Hi All
one week down the track and it is all success at the vertical blogger end. We have had an enormous response from bloggers and advertisers. For ethical link building http://www.verticalblogger.co.uk is the best way to go.
Hope it helps
rafa
Thanks dear,
I am sure that I am going to follow the guidelines giiven by you.
Thank you,
This was a highly informative and very usefuyl article.
I can certainly take a lot away having read it and impliment it in my own website promotions and backlinking.
I am currently using a couple of the items that you list so I at least feel I am already walking in the right direction, and as I offer a free traffic facility myself you have opened up doorways to a whole new world of resources for me.
Thank You Again,
Warm Regards,
Clive Anderson
Awesome post… still building my site at the moment but I’ll certainly apply some of your techniques along with some of my own
Thanks great info!
Thx for that “not to do list” It will be very useful for me , since I’m Also a beginner and still building up my sites ,
Glen,
I’m curious to know your thoughts on removing “nofollow” from comments in links? What do you think about this?
Keep sharing the knowledge!
Mike E.
I’m starting new website based on cloud Living “model”, and there is something I can’t understand.
you mentioned several times the importance of link building in increasing site ranking, I understand that.! but I found several websites with only with less than 10 backlinks with very very high ranking in alexa and google!!! how they managed to beat a site with 100+ backlinks.
The links they have are probably from strong domains, or very relevant.
Great stuff, especially the flippa one. One of the problems with sites for sale on flippa is their traffic is mainly from ppc or affiliates (Click bank etc), I will keep trying. Keep up the good work
Hi Glen,
Great article! I’m just recently started guest blogging on behalf of a client and have been having good results. Now blogging under my own name is another thing altogether (I’m talking major writers block here). Anyway, what I’d like to ask you is whether it would be ethical to repost someone else’s blog (like yours) on my own site if I provide a link back to your site AND give you full credit.
[...] can find blogs that will give you a few link building tips each week and then I go ahead and write 15 in one post. You will find blogs with tips here and there on WordPress SEO, and I go and write what I think is [...]
I have just started the , and am really struggling to grasp my head around backlinks and workin my way up google, i need some sort of manual, or a video manual, any one have any suggestions
guest posting and commenting has been my top ways to build back links .it has other benefits like helping you build a relationship with other bloggers.
This is a solid list and while I like your focus on content, it can be very time consuming and expensive. Plus if your playing catch-up to other sites with massive profiles you’ll need to build more links than will be generated by content hosting and submission. Believe me I know quality is better than volume, but sometimes you just need to find prospective link sources in bulk and use tools to grade their value. Then reach out and negotiate for placement. Ryan
We focuse on content. The link building simulates the real network of the business.
Although, I have been learning some SEO tactics recently, you definitely list a few I have not heard about. Thanks again.
great tips ….i never thought of using flippa..thanks
Very useful article. I’m on the way to promote my website and your article does help me.
i want to learn about seo.
Hi,
What a great information. By experience with link building google put more importance on quality backlinks. So a website with 100 quality backlinks will get more higher ranking than a website with 1000 backlinks ( not focusing on a quality backlink) . Thanks a lot for the useful information.
I’m asking a question, hoping perhaps you can help. I appreciate your insight on creating traffic and developing a following. However, with my blog, I run into some issues. Mainly one issue, that my blog is a blog that has a huge range of topics. Creating backlinks for specific keywords wouldn’t work, because I never settle down to one topic.
Main question: How does one promote/market a blog that is eclectic? I see successful eclectic blogs (Scalzi, Violent Acres), but typically they become famous in other ways. Thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Although, I do not have a answer, I just want to let it be know that I am also interested in the question you posed. I will be starting a site that will be on many topics as well.
Is any1 aware of google sandbox, i think i am in, does any1 know how to get out ??
Hi,
First of all I need to tell you that I have found this website from a link on Polish forum about SEO. There was discussion about “how to do SEO in UK market” and some of users linked to this page as a good source when you are beginner with SEO. So I need to agree that really important is a content of the website – and your website is self example of what you are writing about.
Thank you and best regards
I knew already some of The Tips but thank you for this read and I’m just following your instructions and commenting in a Blog.
Fantastic article Glen! very informative, I would like to ask a question about article/blog posting,
If I have an article post on my own blog and i post it on other website as say a guest post, would this get penalised by google becuase it could be seen as duplicate content?
[...] I wrote in my post on How to Dominate Google, search engines generally tend to follow people. If your site is very static, uninteresting and [...]
Thx for your post,it’s very useful for some guys like me.
Is there also a way for me to add My own blog backlink on my blog for others to copy and paste on their blog? if there is, How. Thanks
Hi , Gren .
Thank you for your article.
I ‘m Japanese , but your post useful for me.
I’ll try them !
Hey Glen, just a quick update that the dofollowblogs site had already expired. Might wanna remove the link there.
Long time lurker, Cloud Living lover, and first-time commenting here. Thank you kindly for the superb content! I notice you didn’t mention submitting to RSS feeds here. Is there any benefit to doing so?
Hello Glen,
I love the writing aspect of blogging, yet getting traffic and sharing my information with as many people as possible is the ultamite goal. Thank you for sharing some of the technical aspects to blogging. I look forward to seeing you at the top!!! (Of Google, Bing, and Yahoo!!!)
P.S. Thank you as well for setting the example of following up on peoples comments. That will for sure have people come back for more
one of the best articles on Link Building I have read. Really glad I’m on your email list.
Getting ready to listen to the podcast of you on the SPI site.
Thanks for sharing your resources and knowledge.
Thanks for the info. I’ve been working for months trying to get it right.You helped out a lot.
Great tips on building links, now if i could get someone to build them for me
Great refresher read, and a couple idea I had not considered before. Thanks for the article!
Great refresher read, and a couple idea I had not considered before. Thanks for the article!
(sorry about re-post, screwed up site URL in the one above.)
Hey Glen,I read your article and started working on it.Your 5 years of study is really very helpful for new bloggers.Keep writing great articles.
Glen,
Thanks for the informative post. I have been slowing implementing your tactics for the last year before even reading this. You just cemented it in for me that I am on the right path. I guess it’s kind of like planting a garden, we have to do the work now and then reap the benefits down the road.
-Kelly
Yeah great article linkbuilding the right way will always be a daunting task.
Then, I guess it’s OK if I leave a link here?
Great text, lots of useful tips, thanks!
Are the edu and gov backlinks still valuable?
Excellent guide, will apply on my linking strategy.
Sergei
Great article! I’ll definitely be implementing not some, but many of these ideas. I guess it’s a game of patience. People usually charge lots of money for this kind of advice so it’s great that you are giving it out for free!
You’ve given me a lot of really good ideas. It’s very hard to find the time to properly do even 4 of these items and still have the time to manage your business as well! The really important thing that I have found out is that it is very difficult to hire somebody to do these tasks well, you really have to do it yourself if you want to see the proper results.
This is a very exhaustive list of things to do when backlinking. For a newbie like I am, I truly appreciate the time and effort you took into writing this post to help other people make it big like you have. I also love the fact that you chose not to focus on one method alone because it takes more than one method to really dominate Google. Again, thank you so much for your post!
Great teachings, I’ve got to visit here more often…….loving Affiliate Marketing
Hey Glen. Q? I love this niche but it is very small. I searched google and there is actually no search using the #2 ie. Learn 2 get organized. But there are a few Learn to get organized. Any suggestions on how I should try and build links for this? I would also like your opinion of my site. First one. Thanks for all your help. you rock!
Gina
Wow, thanks for this. I was glad to hear that trying for just one keyword wasn’t the best approach. I have talked to someone recently that had me thinking I was wrong to target several keyword phrases – you have put my mind at ease. Some amazing tips I’m going to have to start implementing now
Thanks!
Always great to learn from a master.
I’m not sure about my blogsite, if it’s too much or not enough.
I’ll keep learning from you until I can feel I got it right (and make some money at it).
Thanks much!
This article was pretty amazing. I liked most of the info in here and I am linking this article to one of mone. I recently started a blog and i am ranked #7 for one niche and i only have like 6 posts:) Backlink building does work! You just need to know the right way to do it. I also got an expert to help me build my backlinks and he was able to do it for me in days and move me from #7 to #1! Dont ask me how but my site is limited and I think he used everything in this article so everything in this article is the best way to go!
Hey Glen,
Great advice with the flippa site idea, i will do some research into my competitors now.
Thanks for the great info
Colin
As I continue to develop my fledgling business, I come across fantastic resources of information that I can trust and share with others. Glen, your site is quality packed. You certainly have developed quality information that is usable. Developing back link tactics is going to be my focus for the month – this is a great jump off point!
Cheers!
This looks absolutely perfect. All these tinny details are made with lot of background knowledge. I like it a lot. This was a useful post and I think it is rather easy to see from the other comments as well that this post is well written and useful.
I very much enjoyed the article. One thing I have learned is having a three word domain name that contains your keywords will help you significantly. The domains I own that fall into this category consistently rank in the top five.
I am going to be book marking this blog because I find the information so valuable.. I think we as Internet Marketers can get into the habit of going through the motions and not establishing yourself above the competition with great content. I thought that was a key in this post. thanks
Great article!
Good Information on back links thanks for the info.
Not to sound like the sheeple but: great article!
Here I was going to ask something like — working from home for so long do you still feel the need to wear pants every day?
Haha. I’m lying in bed in my boxers right now
Very useful post, thanks
Hi Glen,
I was just reading this post now (quite a while after you wrote it) and after trying the Yahoo! backlink thing I noticed it doesn’t work anymore. I simply used the “link:http://mysite.com/page -site:mysite.com” approace but I always get 0 results no matter what I try. Have things changed since the semi-fusion of Bing and Yahoo? Does this technique still work for you?
I apologize if you wrote about this somewhere else already and I haven’t seen it.
-Michael
Superb post. Just discovered it on Bing. Many thanks for that helpful data. Keep up the superb hard work
Was recommended your blog by a friend and I’m impressed with all of the content. Huge posts and you do pack in more content that most ebooks being sold on WSO and even more so the content is good and relevant.
Between this and WordPress SEO you do have all of SEO covered pretty much.
Got any ideas, posts or content on copywriting? Would love to hear your thoughts/views on that too.
Thanks for this info, it appears I have been sandboxed so I will definitely be utilizing this information.
You said ” That resource was a list of top blogs in my industry, but yours doesn’t have to be the same.”
I checked out the link but there is no list of top blogs in the personal development area.
Is the link right?
Awesome resource Glen. Some of the strategies listed I’ve never heard about – like the CSS directories you mentioned.
I also think the face-off and interview suggestions are really good ideas. Though I’ve heard about them before, I haven’t really tested them out yet. I’ll definitely give it a try soon.
I took down a few notes, so I’ll get started tomorrow. Thanks again for the detailed guide.
Christina
Thanks for sharing your resources and knowledge
Glen, thanks for sharing.
What u’ve explained is helpful guide for me. I’m not good enough to make blog especially in build backlinks. But I think, what I’ve read from your article make me know what I’ve to do next with my blog…
thanks bro.
Good Information on back links thanks for the info.
Thanks for sharing this article I especially love the part about colloboration. If more people did this there sites would rank very well.
[...] of the most popular articles on this site is my in-depth guide on fifteen popular ways you can build links to your website. Search engine rankings rely so heavily on links that attaining them is often a [...]
Link building is one of the last steps I am learning to better understand how to rank better. Thanks for sharing, sometimes it is very easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged when working on building a site. These tips have been useful.
Blessings,
Ron
Suweet advice! I’ve spent the morning researching link-building strategies and your article is the best so far! Thanks!
Thanks for the great post – good reminder to focus on adding value, rather than just trying to gain links for links sake, unlike some SEO advice I have read!
Hi Glen
I bought your cloudliving book and it has been great to work with your template. Recently I got up to position 5 in google front page for my phrase.
But then last weekend all of a sudden i was nowhere to be found… My site shows up in google webmaster tools etc. I only have around 10 backlinks anyway
Do you think this was a penalty from google?
Thanks Glen! As always useful information.
Thanks for this usefull post. I have tried a few of you methods. I use to do link exchnages and I think it’s still working but maybe not as good as before.
I would not recommend an artificial links exchange. Usually when search engine recognize a “suspicious” link to your site he reduce your page rank
Did you read the post?
I did indeed enjoy this post, and I’m applying it! I love the emphasis you’ve placed on quality design – one of the most neglected principles across the blogging niche.
woww..nice post. thank you sir, good for me
Great post Glen, I am impressed by the simple, yet effective methods you have outlined to use in order to get backlinks. You’ve just saved me a ton of money and signing up for yet another ‘Miracle’ product that would promise me the top of Google, yet do ZERO in the end but take my money ! I have already written 11 ezinearticles and will now follow the rest of your recommendations . Superb job =)
Hi Glen,
so I was wondering if you had any feedback after checking out my product. Thanks again for all of the free advice – this was great, and I know that I’ll be able to use a lot of your points to achieve quality backlinks.
This was an enjoyable read. I’m only 24 and was wondering if I could get your feedback on a new company that I just started with my buddy. I’ve built backlinks for multiple websites of companies I’ve worked for (basically realizing it’s busy work but essential to the success of drawing traffic to any website) but I wanted to know the smartest way to go about building backlinks when you’re JUST STARTING OUT. Our website is Spicypackets.com, and we basically sell single-serving packets of your everyday kitchen ingredients. There are a lot of different reasons why I think this product will sell as you can see from our website, but I’m not sure what to devote my time to at first in terms of having a higher page rank on google and drawing traffic to the site. I’m a little new to all of this starting a company and building a brand stuff
Great Article! Good insight into this subject , makes me more aware of back links and there importance within the search engines, with the Do’s and Don’ts.
I mostly concentrate on article marketing and i have written about 1000 articles on different keywords. I also post the same articles to about 30 top ranking article directories. Pls advice what i can do to get traffic from these articles since i currently am not seeing the fruits of my effort as regards to ranking high on search engines.
I’ve kept coming back to this article every few months since you’ve posted it so I feel it’s about time to say thanks! So thank you Glen for sharing what you know with us!
Great article! found it while looking through a forum on SEO techniques, thank you!
Arnold
Thanks man I just started this whole SEO business and had no idea how to build backlinks every other website I went to offered me some stupid $100 backlink package or something.
Hi Glen,
Excellent article!!! I am not sure if you answered this question in the comments its just to much to read. I was wondering if I write original articles for my website can I use those same articles on squidoo and ezine? Will search engines still view that as unoriginal content?
Looking forward to your response
Shomari
This a very good article Glen. I have a site about Gothenburgs history and I will use your advice to get ranking improvements. Thanks again. Helio
Glen thanks for the great information on link building. I will be coming back to study some more.
I also use mostly article marketing for backlinks, and have recently discovered Hubpages and Squidoo. I am also not seeing great results from my articles, even if I have done proper keyword research. I have only written about 200 so far, but I am planning to write more.
Thanks for a great article, I am going to bookmark it!
Hey Glen, what are your thoughts on link exchanges within your niche? Another thought, It seems that the meta description tag has relevance in Google SERPS. I’m not sure, but it sure seems that small changes in the description changes my site one way or the other. What do you think?
Thanks for the awesome article btw.
your post is a great help to me. i am in the process of building links on my new blog and this article guides me on how and where to build a good quality backlinks. thanks for sharing. some of your post interest me too.
Glen,
I can tell that you must have a great work ethic and are truly here to serve. Your article is like a crash course in best SEO tactics, and for that I’m truly grateful. I’ve been doing this off and on for five years, and seriously, it’s like you nailed the “best of” tactics that I’ve learned (and some of them I’ve since forgotten). Nice work and many blessings to you. I needed the refresher.
Mike Olive
thanks for the great article. i will try to giving it a shot.
If i make 1,000 backlinks in one week, my blog could be penalized by google?
Hi Glen,
Great and informative post!
I’ve recently tried to create a mini site around a kw that has less than 10k competitors. I’ve got a youtube video that links to it – I’ve social bookmarked – and the source that taught this instruction basically said that this was enough to rank on the first page as long as I am not sandboxed. Every social bookmark I created (practically) had the anchor text I was targeting – I am wondering if that was a bad move.
My site is now indexed in google when i type mydomain.com – as well as some posts – I didn’t add any affiliate links yet.
I guess the main question I am coming to is – how do I know if I’ve been sandboxed? Is there any scenario where I should expect to be ranking on the first page within a week?
Hopefully my questions are clear enough – any insight you can give will be great!
Thanks for your help and amazing blog!
Hi Glen
Many thanks for the info here. Already solved two problems I had by just reading thru the site and “listening” with my eyes
Thanks
Is there such a thing as building links too fast? Will I get sandboxed if I build 50-100 links per day on a new domain? How can I get a new site to rank quickly if it has these problems that come attached?
I’m wondering if all this talk about building links too fast is just talk from people trying to overcomplicate things.
Taj,
Be careful on link building too fast. From what I have learned over the last year, in the beginning, link sparingly. If I have a new domain, I develop backlinks a couple a day for about a month…then I start ratcheting up. If you do too many, Google (in particular), will throw you down the hole for awhile….you can’t be too in a hurry.
All the best,
Sofia
I use an automated link building site for all my niche websites, haven’t had any troubles as yet. Just great results. The one i use builds links at a natural pace so that’s why my sites do well and don’t get Google slapped.
Why are you leaving multiple comments recommending different services :S
One method that I like to use is building feeder sites. It is a lot of work, a lot, but hey what isn’t? If done right, they can provide both traffic and quality back links plus an additional source of income.
Tnx man , here i will start with your blog comments
tnx for backlink ” Joke “
Hi Glen..
Another great post from you, Great…
Checking the competitors backlink, it’s never crossed my mind. I’ll try it immediately. Thanks for share…
Regards…
Thanks for the great info. I have been using Yahoo to check my competitors links as well. I also have published a few articles on Ezine. I just signed up for hubpages and squidoo. Another option to consider might be volunteering somewhere and having your company or website on placed on their page. That has worked for me too.
Thanks again!
Outstanding information over again! Thanks a lot:)
I read the link trio article and I decided to read some a few more post on your site and this jumped out at me. Like the ‘link trio’ article everything seems so simple but you just don’t see it until it’s pointed out to you, so than you for the gentle nudge in the right direction.
Ryan
thanks man for the useful infos!!
Agreed.
It’s important to build backlinks naturally. Even if you work extremely hard commenting on other blogs, writing great content which you are mentioned and using social media, you should be clean in the eyes of Google.
It’s sites that get 1,000s of backlinks all of a sudden which are fishy. Automated software is a nice idea but it doesn’t beat hard work and building a community.
Great list, I will try them out!
Again, a lot of information which proves to be both valuable and important.
Lnk building is a slow but necessary task – and I set aside an hour each day doing just that. A bit of research for a topical link source is also important
I’m really not 100% sure about automated social bookmarkers, like you it makes me feel bad but great seo tips. Well done.
I’ve enjoyed this post and WordPress SEO as well. I think our site is terrific and took your suggestion for the website galleries and submitted it to a number of them. Remains to be seen if they think it’s worth showcasing, but we do receive plenty of very positive comments for it and the content. Main reason for trying to get it ‘out there’ more is to improve rankings on Google. Plenty of original content – own and guest but still elusive to rankings.
Did have a query like the ‘cynical’ person’s comment previously about the backlink automated product – really wondered if that could give you more problems. Would be great if it’s not really an issue.
Thanks for your relatively easy to understand posts. I just need another few hours to go through them bit by bit again!
Nice post, I like the what not to do part, I have a feeling my blog may be set up as dofollow as I get more spam comments then I do hits to the website
awesom post, like alway. its one of my favorites
Lots of great info! I’ll probably spend the next few weeks just trying to implement everything.
A great and must read, the four letter word of getting website ranking success ‘work” The more tips the more sign ups, articles, money.
thanks for more “useful” work
dealzoid
I found a new favorite blog to read (Viper Chill). Thanks for the in-depth article.
For me this was a great refresher of all the things I need to be doing. Each day I’ll pick a different link-building technique and give all my sites a little boost.
Thanks!
adding thousands of backlinks will be a really hard job. does anyone know any company that can create backlinks to my site sholod.com (localized shout out platform). i tried to find from india, but i really don’t have any experience in terms of outsourcing.
I have just started working on my site … putting few hrs for building backlinks and networking sites.Your post is very hand for SEO aspirants like us.
hi Glen!
i am reading & loving your book & posts…fatafati ( in my dialect it means excellent)!
Glen,
my comments are not reaching you….but at least i can write something on blog post!
take care.
I liked this post it was very interesting. I just started my blog a few weeks ago and I am having trouble getting traffic (to be expected) but i felt like i needed to start to get links some how. This article was a great way for my website to start getting out their and I am using some of these techniques right now. Too soon to tell the success of them but I feel really good about it.
Thank you!
Hi Glen,
Although this article learns how to build links by yourself. I would like to outsource my SEO for a simple site, not a lot of competition. Do you have any good suggestions for a SEO service or person, someone trustworthy?
Thanks in advance.
Richard
P.s. like the new site design
Great article and I will start using some of your recommendations today:)
Especially the flippa hint tells me, that you are really interested in helping us guys out. This is something i would not have shared. I mean, reverse engineering is propably the hidden obvious technique ever. Anyways, thank you for this comprehensive Article.
Seriously a really great well written article with some ideas I had not thought of. I notice a lot of places offering “profile links”. What is your opinion on those. Obviously it is easy to put my URL in the signature for the various forums I frequent but is this a very effective tool?
Thank you so much for all the info. I’m always struggling with finding links and had no idea about a lot of this. I believe this will definitely get me moving in the right direction. I also appreciate the links you provided to get us started!
I found out your blog since you wrote a comment in a Portuguese blog some days ago.
I think you have good and useful content.
I will be here more frequently from now on for sure.
Thans for the tips.
thanks for writing these posts
hi glen!
can you write me a content for my own mini site?
(i know it is a very daring request!!!)
hy … hi glen
I come from Indonesia, I’m learning to create a blog.
all atrtikel on your website is very helpful.
Great post. I also study SEO and this post was very helpful.
wow… huge and awesome post… one of your best posts, along with the one about how to write a 30k ebook
Good luck and keep up the work! Thank you..
It’s funny…..as much as I think I know about SEO and the most effective link building tactics, I get rosy cheeked reading this post and in particular what ‘not to do’ while link building.
I get most of it right most of the time, but I fail the link exchange test for sure (with some niche sites).
Thanks for the wake up call Glen. It seems every time I search (subconsciously) for information I know I need to hear, I find it.
Thanks for the tips! I have been working on a website called http://www.golfcompete.com and have been trying to build the SEO. I heard a lot about backlinks and how much they can help. I am just trying to figure out the most efficient way to do it now.
very Nice and informative post,most of the sites i did not know that,thanks for sharing them.
Woow.. thanks for the tips Glen, such an easy way to understand google for a newbie like me.
Bookmarked and definitely will came back!
This is the second great article I’ve read on your site. In this case I’ll be signing up to your newsletter because of your post. I especially like the tip to check competitor’s backlinks for sources of backlinks.
Well done, thanks
wow
just another great tips,
going to practice some of them!
Here’s a question: you only mention checking backlinks in ‘google’ but suppose you’ve got a keyword with the top ranking site only have 34 backlinks in google but 9,000 in Yahoo. Do you pursue it or not bother?
Thanks!
I never check in Google actually. Just Yahoo and Open Site Explorer
Ok cool thanks!
Great resource Glen!
I’ve just gone through your article and there’s so much good advice. Will definitely look into it all and start applying some of your suggestions.
Wow!
Everything was explained like I was in a lecture. Some of them I already know but you did a good job really putting it in one powerful lesson.
I have to admit I am still learning how to properly build backlinks and this is very helpful.
I should probably start building backlinks now.
:>
Thanks for those great tops Glen, I particularly like the one about uisng Flippa then reverse engineering to see where those sites listed get their links from, brilliant!
Great information, I am a physician trying to get my name out there and this article has been helpful for me and my practice.
Great tips and article. I will be trying some of these techniques out slowly to drive traffic to my new blog. Thanks!
Hi Glen,
Thanks for the clear and concise article. I think building links is really a drag, but the most effective thing to do with your time. (well obviously you need content to begin with) I have noticed if you try to get links thru some ‘paid’ method, maybe 1 out 10 actually sticks around. What happens to the others? Who knows. Anyway, your article started a great conversation here in the comments as well. You’re really helping the community. Thanks!
I have only lately discovered your blog and find it incredibly informative. As a smaller blogger, I am finding a lot of good insights here that will be useful in the future.
Currently I’m putting together a post on the Panda update and what it means to other small bloggers like myself. Part of that blog will of course deal with backlinking, so I will definitely link back to this great article.
Thanks a lot!
Allisondduncan.com | The Nerd Connection
Hey Glen,
Great, great resource.
Just wanted to let you know that I have a little bit of a higher opinion of HubPages than you might have ; ) Perhaps that’s because I’ve been involved in the HubPages community for a while, I’ve met some of the higher-ups, and there are lots of intelligent people who are committed to policing the site. Sure, still some garbage from time to time, but their standards are getting tougher and tougher.
That’s just an aside. I’m working hard on EzineArticles and I’ll definitely check out some of the other things you’ve mentioned here.
Glen,
Another informative post with a wealth of info. Do you spend much time reasearching an article before wrotting.
Wonderful information, hopefully works out for me in future. Thanks!
Thnx Glen for this wonderful info, it’s been really helpful to me.
Some really useful information for me here, thanks!
Have been having kicking off with this whole link-building process, so this is what I need to get me going. I hope.
Thank you for this valuable post. I am starting link building for my business website so to rank good in Google.
This post is in my favorites.
Awesome job.
Hi Glen,
I come back to this post again and again. Your quality of info and writing style are much better than other sites on link building:)
Thanks man,
Derek
Thanks for this tips.
Up until now, I only build a website with no care about promoting my site.
It’s really an eye opener.
A lot of great information.
I do not know if it was just because it was the last thing discussed or not, but I got the most use out of not having all your anchor text be the same because it looks unnatural. I never thought of that.
I am slowly building up my links to a forum and it is very tough. I will try some of your techniques.
Thanks,
Brian
I’m just getting started learning about link building and this post was incredibly helpful. Definitely will be something I come back to in the future!
Awesome content here! I am going to bookmark this as you have a lot of great resources.
I’m trying to get into the habit of blog commenting and it’s going really slow, but maybe one day I will get up to speed as I know it really does work.
I never would have thought to browse around at Flippa, but I am going to do that for sure!
Social bookmarking I have done, but I am not really sure it benefits me, but I will keep at it.
Anyway – thanks for the post
Linda
This is the most informative article I’ve read on link building. Thank you so much!
On of the most informative blogs on this subject and you sound (unlike some) like you know what you are talking about. I need to get cracking more on this stuff – it can be very hard work ….and start up my blog too.
Thanks for sharing that great advice. Trying to get links for a site inspired by your cloud niche series. I’ll let you guess which episode
You have provided the great information on building the back links,i will try to implement suggustions which you have provided get good ranking.Once again thanks for information.–Vijay.
Cool stuff!
I didn’t know I can do some reverse engineering from flippa. However, 1 thing I note that the yahoo explorer only show a partial of the backlink. So, we can only replicate some of the successful backlink:)
This is my favorite blog of yours so far. I have one question. If you optimize your web domain, does it improve your Google Local/Places ranking? If anyone knows the answer to this question, please let me know. Thanks.
Awesome content. Your advices are simply the best
Thanks for the good information. I already start to build links to my site. Keep up thge good work.
Cheers
Stefanie E.
Thanks for the info, non-scammy SEO information is definitely something we need more of!
wuao this is one of the best post i ever read in a long time thank you
Thanks for this article, i have just found this blog and i think now that the advice provided in seo courses isn’t always the best, will be back for more
Excellent Artilce thanks for this info!
Glen,
I’ve refered to your articles a few times now and you have great straight-forward information! Question, does submitting your blog to free blog directories (provide any benefit as far how you rank with google)? Any quick thoughts or links?
Excellent insights and duly follow your step by step guides in below. Thanks heaps!
Great list, I will try them out!
all are useful information, thank you for sharing
I really enjoyed reading your article. There’s some great tips in there.
You did a very thorough job. Thanks for providing such a helpful resource. The idea about searching other sites backlinks is a great one.
Great article!
I have been an SEO and social marketing analyst for many years, but for the past two I’ve been working in Public Health. I recently quit my job and my husband and I are going to travel North America in a travel trailer with our dog – and the goal is to optimize the blog and get it working for us on the road. This was a great refresher – it’s very fun and interesting to finally be using SEO and social marketing tactics for myself rather than clients. These are some fabulous link building tips – many of which I had nearly forgotten about and will now be utilizing for our blog.
Cheers,
Allison
this is a really excelent article. Thanks so much for it. Keep doing it.
thank you.. it will be used for my social networking site
Hi Glen this is my first time on your site and although i knew about some of your marketing tips I certainly learn t a few new ones.Thanks for sharing and I will rss your blog and look forward to updates,
cheers
Dee
Some great points that I did’nt even think of until now.
Then can be no better article than this about backlinks, thanks as always.
Great tools! Just seen this site only yesterday, but I’ve learnt far more than that. Thanks.Keep it going.
how about leaving trails on bravejournal blog?
Glen,
Thanks for the informative post. I didnt realize that building backlinks too quickly might arouse suspicion with search engines. It makes sense, organic is best.
- Mike
Now – during my link building efforts at WMG I only acquire good one way links and see a huge amount of success on various campaigns on a daily basis by using the techniques that I employ – I’d like to ask whether link exchanging should be considered a dead practice, I have seen some great results whilst performing SEO tests. They suggested that link exchanging with trusted and extremely relevant sources can be very beneficial indeed. SEO seems to progress so fast but it also goes in cycles – do you think a handful of say 2-4 nice trust link exchanges is still a no no?
Regards
Ed
Great information. I keep coming back here because you always have a lot of helpful blog posts whether it be about SEO or affiliate websites. Bought Cloud Living and have been telling everyone about it!
This was fabulous. Thank you.
it’s so great. I never saw a great article like this before. thanks for letting me know.
nice one…but what are dofollow and no follow links?
a useful and down to earth advices…thanks Glen!!
Lots of great ideas! Thanks so much… I’ll be using these on my own blog for sure.
Thanks for your informations!
Now i can see where some writers in my area are getting info. Not only from their exprerience!
Keep the good work!
a very helpful post…..Thanks for Flippa auctions…I’ve only heard it today
It seams that links are losing to social aspect of the whole Internet presence. Algo will more and more favor websites with tons of tweets, shares and google pluses than just ones with bunch of links. But nevertheless, classic links are still very strong in every LB campain
Pretty awesome post!
I know this is an old article and post, but i must say this is one of the most relevant and well-written articles I have ever come across. I highly enjoyed this and will surely be using your blog in the future. Thanks Glen
Thanks for this article it is somewhat old yes, however it was very helpful to me. i’m just starting out trying to learn the ropes of everything and your article has been the most helpful yet.
Hi Glen! I have a question for you! First off, I wanted to say how AWESOME it is that you are so interactive with your readers in the comment section. You ROCK! Second.
What are your thoughts on automation tools for SEO? On a scale from one to 10 can you rank these tools in importance or describe if/how/when you use them? I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours reading forums, blogs, and eBooks and I’ve got some decent traffic to my first 3 or 4 sites. I made many mistakes though with my first sites – such as misunderstanding the CPC, or taking your advice too literally “writing down my passions”. By too literally, I mean – sometimes your passions aren’t very marketable.
So, in the interest of making money, I’ve decided to spread out and start some product specific niche sites. I spent hours researching keywords and finding domains and I’ve established about 15 of these sites with some basic content and “high CTR” wordpress themes. Going through and manually link building for all 15 niches is mind numbing and time consuming. I probably should have started with five, but – it is what it is. For the sake of scaling up, what do you think about these products which are talked about in literally every IM forum (Warrior Forum, WickedFire, BlackHat World)
1) Bookmarking Demon
2) Scrapebox
3) AMR (Article Marketing Robot)
4) The Best Spinner
5) SeNuke
Thanks for your thoughts Glen.
I have this post bookmarked and frequently refer to it when building links. Thanks for providing such a useful resource.
Thank you for the valuable information. I’m building backlinks to a client’s website and this information has been more than helpful!
Hey Glen,
Fantastic free advice! I must say that I have also tough myself SEO over the last couple years, but you have tough me a few things. Thanks.
I have a favor to ask, I recently released a new website for set and forget backlink building. It’s called “The Link Building Dude”.
I was wondering if I could open a free account for you to try it out on one of your sites, then write a review after a couple of months?
I know it works because I have tested it on a few of my own sites already, but I need someone else to give it a go.
Also I would be happy to place a link to your page if you could do this for me
Thanks!
Sam
Hi, Thanks for your article, it was really what I was looking for to explain backlinking as I am fairly new to this type of thing. I appreciate the explanations given and was able to understand it. I was distracted a couple of times as there is a lot of other great articles that I can use. Thanks again for your work it’ most appreciated for my own site and I know that I can put it to good use.
Gemma
I really like this article. I am working on building my own website and your information will really come in handy. Its good to see people out there really want to help.
Great information and I’m so glad to have stumbled upon this URL. You’re brilliant.
Thanks Paul
Hi Glen excellent article,
What is your view on automated backlink creators, like SENuke and Evo Pro? Are they actually needed?
Amrit
Excellent post! Very helpfull from the beginning till the last word. Definitely bookmark for the future reference! Cheers mate
thanks for your post.Its really very useful from begining to end…
Nice post on how to build backlinks without getting pages spammed!! Enjoyed post really!!
interesting reading, many of these tips are common sense but a well put together article…mant thanks
Thanks for doing such a great job of clearing up my link building confusion. I outsource this work and have learned that certain sources work much better than others. Your post show why. Some do link building correctly most don’t.
Thanka Glen, I’m just getting started on this path and this article has certainly pointed me in the right direction. Keep up the good work.
I did really enjoy this post!!!! A good friend of mine recommended your site few days ago and I am eating up all your blog pages, such good stuff.
Got any advice for guest posting? How do you go about building relationship with other sites?
Thanks
Ian
Thanks Glen,
Signing up for EzineArticles now. excited to see to results soon!
Keep it up!
Very informative , great work
Very good article. great work!
Hi Glen,
I enjoyed every bit of this fine article. You have highlighted some very important points that I’m going to implement myself.
I have a few blogs that I neglected them lately, being busy with my online retail clothing store. I’m trying hard to get it up and running, and I really can use some quality back links.
I’ve just got across your site and I like it. I wrote a few articles in the past on Ezine, and for now I will follow this avenue.
I Bookmarked your site and I’ll be back for some more. Great info!
Thanks Glen.
This is an all in one online service about online earnings. You will get some useful information about online earnings here which really help you to build your carrier in home based online works. This is not a site from where you can earn money. But this site will help you to find information about online earnings. We will show you some ways which will really help you to find online job. So be ready and start earning.
awesome post! i guess many people try to build to fast
Thank for this really useful article. I would like to increase of visits on our site but actually is dificult because we have like “visit card” site of our family… But after reading this article I received some ideas – So I will try something from this shared experience.
Hi,
Firstly, great blog and i think it’s all great info….the only one i’m curious about is one of the last points about linking programs…i currently use Linksmanager for a few of my websites and i think you’re probably correct about link swapping programs, but ultimately, goggle is looking for site with links. Admittedly, there are better ways to obtain links, but is what you get for the (little) time one spends on such an easy reciprocating link, is it not worth it, as you can gain a good handful of relevant links within a few minutes.
Its only for that reason do i continue to persist with Linksmanager…but the rest of my time, i do try to participate in other methods that gain better quality links.
Anyway, its all a big game at the end of the day isn’t it?!…unfortunately for some, our livelihoods depend on it.
Steve J
Hey Glen!
As I’m currently starting up my own webproject right now, this is my go to guide! I find myself re-reading this once a week! Thanks for your sharing!
Never knew Building Links Around One Phrase is bad for SEO. Will use this idea in future. Thanks,
Was watching a video on great sites (by Alex & Becker) and they had your site listed.
Glad I stopped by and have subscribed to you. Great informative content.
Also refreshing to read an article that’s not filled with affiliate links.
Thanks again!
Glen, this one page has provided me more information than the previous ten website visits. I am an instructional designer with a passion for e-Learning and technologies that can be used to enhance learning.
Recently, I decided to activate my entrepreneurial spirit and started my own business. My goal is to use technology to deliver an outstanding educational experience. The web is certainly one of the most important aspects of my business. For this reason I have been dedicating a lot of time to SEO.
Thank you for your very informative page.
PAULO CASTRO | President
Weston, Florida | USA
The first tip “Build Site for People” is always true. My website has been online for almost a year but I have never taken link building seriously. All I do are just building content, and creating useful resource.
Really nice article. I enjoyed reading it. I was looking for this right from the yesterday and here i got it
Thank you very much
Thank you so much for your extremely informative post. So many ways to backlink, and the things to avoid. Thank you again.
Awesome article!
Thanks a lot!
very nice article … you were soo clear
I want to start by saying first: “Thank You!”. This article has been very useful in defining how to go forward in my web presence. I have relied solely on “word of mouth” advertising in the past, and for the most part it has worked pretty well. There is a new market however that I have no presence. I am in the process of building a website and hopefully getting it out here and noticed.
Again, thanks for all the info.
Best,
Jonas Lee
Glen,
Thanks for the great article. I’m in the early stages of launching my blog and link building and this article has helped me out a lot. I’ve read a lot of articles on the topic and this is by far the most resourceful I have found.
Thanks,
Max
Found your article really helpful. I also visited Flippa awhile back and started something up myself, but I’m learning that there really wasn’t much of a need for it, so will have to go back to the drawing board. I do think the advice about putting up a link per domain is definitely the go and have had more results from doing that than other stuff. If you can go viral too with something, that helps a lot as well!
Hi Glen, just found your website and this is an article that attracted me at my first glance. There are 2 points that kind of strucks me though:
- Build a Site for People
- Check Flippa Auctions
The first one is 100% correct. You see, I have this website that I don’t do backlinks that much, but it has been staying at the #1 spot on Google for the last 3 years or so. It’s all about quality content, guys. This website has BILLIONS of competing pages, and I rank #1 for a ONE-WORD keyword!
thats really amazing. i have learn something new here.
This is a great article. However, i was concerned with the part about link farming. From what i understand, if you own multiple domains, it is NOT a good idea to link to each other? Is that considered Spamming to search engines? Well, if i have a main site which i do and place all of my original content there, then would search engines penalize me for linking to my other sites in my blogroll and linking from those sites to my main site as well? I want visitors to know about my other sites as well without search engines punishing me for link farming to my other sites. I originally set the link relations as “other sites i own” should the relations change to something like ” colleague” or “partner”?
I like how everyone is commenting just to add a link to their site. Me, too.
Good stuff, though.
Really a great article. It gives a detailed idea, to people like me who are new in this field, as to what is to be done to improve their site.
This one page has provided me more information than the previous ten website visits.
Great article. There are two areas in my SEO learning where I have real roadblocks… Backlinks and RSS. This helps clear up some of my confusion on the backlinking process. Thank you!
Russ Banister
Hi Glen,
Just dropping by to read your post. I found a lot of excellent information on your site and implementing the golden nuggets I learned especially SEO.
Wow that was awesome post; i know must of thing listed here but this is really great post.
Hi Guys.
I have been using book marking demon on various pages of my new site, however, when I try to find the links on yahoo it just come up with an error page saying check your spelling. Does this still work or has yahoo changed things?
Thanks
Hi Glen, I found your wite just by chance. Never found a blog/site as clean as yours. Why I liked and unfortunately, I would like to try to achieve for my own site, cleanest as possible. And your posts were awesome and I’m bookmarking your site to learn more out of it. Thanks for all the explanations, and keep up the good work!
sorry for the typo…
I love your article. I like the most what you are saying: “search engines follow people”. Whatever you create, create it for people to read usefully and come back your site. You also give a lot of link build tips. Thank you
great article !! it really help me:)
Very useful and informative article. Please keep it up. Thanks again for this sharing.
Definitely usefull. But sometime i wonder, why some sites seems effortless to get better rank in google, eventhough they’re not really good and still new. while some other, eternity didnt even help to get them to 10th page.
I used to try everything. I think i’ve done pretty good job, though not that much, direct submitting, linking, but still my blog aint move in rank.
I think it probably got to do with my niche keyword’s choice. I donno. I still learn here.
Btw, thank you for your very useful information, hiksss, i envy you for having crowded blog like this. I think i’m gonna try one of your trick soon.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, good post!
I have done what you mention about looking at Flippa websites and trying to duplicate.
see where the links are coming from and do the same.
Very Detailed Article, thanks for all the good information.
Thanks Glen. Absolutely great article, well detailed, and so informative. I’m trying so hard to get links to my blogs, it’s unreal! But I know it takes time. I enjoy reading your articles, and I’ll bookmark this one to come back to it whenever I need some fresh ideas.
Thanks man,
Mike
Great linking guide. Already used yahoo to find other sites back links and was using link exchanges a lot, maybe ill cut down on that now. Thanks a lot.
Warren
I’m such a rookie! But I found this post through the cloud blogging course. Tons of information and very helpful.
Using Flippa to gain some backlinks is an interesting idea. Great information in your post, thanks.
Just started as a blogger. My website appears to have all of the necessities to be productiive, but getting traffic to it has been a problem. I knew backlinking was a important part of being successful, but did not know how to go about getting them. I will certainly try your suggestions. You have made my general understanding of backlinking must better and I thank you for the information.
Thanks for clarifying a subject matter everyone else seems to make too complex. Definitely appreciate giving specific examples, ones I will be checking out and using. Glad I have resisted the temptation to engage in the multiple link exchange offers I have gotten
Do you have any idea where i can buy backlinks?
Hi Glen, I found this article on Google and keeping this one on my Categorian for future reference. I already learned a lot though, but there are still some areas worth venturing lol
Thanks for these valuable info and good luck for me.
More power to you
Can’t say much more than’s been said in the 300 odd comments….thanks for sharing! Now am off to check competitor’s backlinks
hi Glen,
I know a couple of friends who have many viewers on their youtube channels. Suppose i get them to add my website link to their description underneath the video. Will that give me loads of backlinks?
Sweet article, i love this!
Thanks for posting this… seems I came to your site from
Pat Flynn’s site cant really mention but you rock!
Sheyi
Thanks for the great article. As someone who is trying to get ranked higher in google (without doing anything that is going to get me flagged) in an uber competitive market, these tips will go a long way. I’ve already picked up Market Samurai to research what my competitors are doing, went to themeforest to pick up a nice theme to work with (using opencart), got a blog going, and plan to submit to CSS directories once I have the website finalized. It’s nice to know there are ways to improve your ranking that don’t cost a fortune and don’t require black hat SEO. Thanks again!
Glen this is fresh stuff to me. I never heard much else besides just doing article marketing and bookmarking. Man I need to get on top of it!
Thanks for the article.
Boris
I have read your article carefully. I have a question . How much time need to google show back link show from posting date? Another question social bookmark site give any back link?
Like digg, delicious, bebo etc.
Great information. Very helpful in getting an education about how to increase a websites popularity. Thanks
Hi great information Glen, Lot of techniques I haven’t tried. Have you used Bookmarking Demon, seems like it could definitely save a lot of time.
Thanks Again
Joe
Hey Glen, Sorry if you’ve already answered this, but would you recommend using BuildMyRank?
Hi Glen,
Read through your article again and thanks for the wealth of information. However, I cannot agree with you on Article Directories.
I was a regular contributor and was getting close to a thousand views every month, this is now down to a trickle and now is just over 100 a month with only 12 URL clicks.
Regards
Russ
I don’t use them for their traffic…
Wooow really helpful post for me. great writing….
Quick question, Should you link your backlinks to your main page ( homepage ) or to your post pages or do a little bit of both?
In the past (2009), I used article writing to get backlinks to my site. I recently checked my articles in ezinearticles.com and was disappointed to see the new article pages are now all low or no PR. I seem to recall that the PR was higher for my article pages in the past. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Hello Glen, first of all I want to say that after I read some of your blogs I felt truly amazed and inspired.
thanks for such a useful blog
I found your site today and I spend almost 7 hours reading and trying to understand every detail from your blogs. I felt that I have been missing so much!
I had a small blog in wordpress from school but nothing big. I am just a beginner and I feel pretty excited about all the ideas that you give.
I know this could be dumb to ask but could you tell me how do I use the yahoo for seeing how many backlinks a page has?
I tried today but I couldnt
I will be reading every single post of you.
Congrats for this wonderful blog!!
Sadly they closed down the tools ability. My apologies.
Thanks so much for your support and feedback!
As an alternative, you can use ahrefs.com and opensiteexplorer.org instead of the Yahoo tool to explore URL backlinks.
I have just started my backlinking strategy and this has been of great help. I will certainly keep in mind these strategies in my campaigns. thanx
This is really very helpful ! One thing I wanna confirmed which one is better commenting on blog or posting threads on forums.
Thanks for this article Glen. i found it using Stumble Upon and bookmark your blog. People shouldn’t underestimate the power of this social network to find great content. Kudos for you mate.
Glen.. you’re one of the guy who don’t spray BS over their visitors but share Gold with them.
Is commenting on nowfollow blog is good for SEO in any aspect? I am confused about it.
Thanks for the article. Just starting trying to build backlinks for my website, so I really appreciate the information. You must be doing something right, as you returned as one of the top pages on the web. Cheers!
Glen,
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve landed on this page. Yet, I still read the whole thing – word for word. Today’s take away, when building links on dofollow comments, don’t be afraid to use different keywords and/or your domain as a whole. I have realized that I need to change the way I post comments.
Thanks for the help. I have been looking for info on backlinks and you were the #1 result. Guess you know what you are talking about!
A very nice congregation of methods to build backlinks. Although I wouldn’t be too keen on spamming article directories to get backlinks, employing all the methods listed in the article slowly and steadily should definitely help one get backlinks over a period of time.
Wow, you have written a very informative article about Backlinks. You have help me understand and realise the importance of Backlinks. I’m going to spend more time on my website banklinks. Thanks for your effort to write such a detail article.
Thanks for the link background. I’m currently banging out some back linking and it’s refreshing to hear that my strategy will fit in with yours. I don’t know if you will read this, but I heard you were in Cape Town. There is a great organization there called the DAD fund. I don’t know what you could offer them, or they could offer you, but they are really great people and they are running great programs in townships there.
Salud,
Ian
I’m working on traffic building right now, and currently do the following steps that seem to really work:
1. Create and post my content to my main blog.
2. Write a 100 -300 word summary on Posterous, deeplinking to the main blog article on the keyword anchor text desired. Posterous auto-posts to your wordpress/blogger accounts, so this way, the summary hits three wordpress and three blogger accounts. I have three posterous accounts set up, all going to different blogs/social medias
3. I post the summary post URLS to social media as a buffer to my main site, and just a few social media updates that go direct to the main website.
This seems to be working very well and in my first month, went from “going live” to 100+ uniques daily, but am always looking for new ways to build traffic.
This wonderful post gives me more ideas about tweaking my backlink strategy (originally based on Pat Flynn’s post, but modified to meet my needs/lifestyle).
Thanks so much Glen!
I really damn sure that there is no this much of detailed post with veteran guides to build backlinks across the web.. totally got points and worthy.
Hey Glen
I don’t suppose that I’d be in luck on this one and you’re still monitoring comments on an old article?
It seems I worked too fast and have been sandboxed by google…I’m curious if you have any advice on how to get out of this mess as quick as possible?
I’d appreciate any insights.
regards
Kristjan
Great post! I’ve been working so hard to build backlinks for some time now. I wish I had read this first.
This is one of the best resources I`ve found till now. Truly a good and valuable article. Im learning right now about backlinks and how to set up a great linkbuilding strategy. This is one of the best i`ve seen. Thanks alot for sharing the information.
Im making backlinks everyday right now and it is a very time consuming job. With new advise i can also diversify my backlink profile so it would look more natural. How much time do you spend on average to make backlinks?
Well it’s my first time on your blog. Nice post this one is!
And 409 comments – wauuu
You now in my rss reader on netvibes!
Thanks!
I have been breaking my head over how to build quality backlinks. This post gave me some relief . Thanks.
Thanks, good post!
hey,
Now a days yahoo search stopped giving backlinks by “link:url”.So, now what’s next we can use as an alternative.???
link:pageurl -site:domain.com seem quite useful because we can spy on other high pr blog.
WOW! This info has helped me with my rankings when I applied it to my link building strategies.
I read this a couple of months ago and have not stopped using the tips provided.
Cool, it helped me a lot and I just built a backlink to my site:)
Cheers
Great tips as always!
Some great ideas here – much appreciated. I particularly like the Flippa recommendation. Thanks Glen.
Excellent article – probably one of the best on SEO.
Wow this article is superb! One of the best, if not the very best I have read of SEO – even if it is 2 years old. What makes it great is the examples of places we should be trying to build links from.
Very useful,
Thanks!
Josh
What we have heard recently is that Google are penalising people that are over optimising. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months.
I think the real answer is do not under any circumstances put all your eggs in one linkbuilding basket.
Mix it up.
Thanks Glen. Superb as always.
Dan, it seams that i have read the same article. My opinion is that the future in seo is not the link building as we all know it. The future is the article marketing (unique and nice) and a clear and unique content on page.
Great article that touches on a little bit of everything. I’m still new to SEO and learning on the fly has been quite the experience. It definitely takes time to get a lot of traffic to a new website.
good Job. And I will follow your points carefully
thx
Great article – thanks for providing such in-depth information.
I think going forward, I’m going to concentrate on more guest posting. It seems Google is doing a bit of a shake-up lately, and to me, guest posts would seem to be the safest form of link building now.
It is a very helpful post …well done, now i going to create my backlinks
Excellent article – Great article – thanks for providing such in-depth information.
Great article. Thanks for the advice.
Awesome. I really like your article.
Geez this page was a long read, but it was a great one through and through. Thanks for sharing.
I am never thinking of checking the competitor backline. You have giving me such a good idea to build more backline.
Glen…thanks for taking the time to write this. Is Google etc. still giving relevance to Squidoo? I thought they were ‘slapped’ awhile back? How relevant are internal links in your blog posts?
Thanks,
Larry
Thanks alot, for someone just starting i appreciate your great resources, i wanted to ask if you had any thoughts about the sales of tshirts, or affliate programs to add to your website?
These are the evergreen link building Technic but after the panda and penguin update i’m bit confuse about link building strategy , is feed submition is still safe ?
Really, Glen, you have written a great article with great content. Thanks, for the information. I really liked that saying :- “Search engines follow people”.
Very useful information, just what I’ve been looking for.
I am in a Master Mind Group. We are helping each other learn more about SEO and how to increase our blog traffic. I will share this site with my Master Mind Partner.
I have bookmarked your site and will return often.
Thank you for sharing what you have learned in your last 5 years!
Here’s to many more years of great content and success!
Tonya
Excellent Article Glen. Really Superb explanation.
BTW Happy Birth Day
Great article. I like the flippa idea and you showed me a lot of CSS galleries that I can submit to you. Props on the good work man!
I have read some topics about back links but this article seems to most useful. Thank for sharing your ideal.
I would add that each of these SEO tips takes a lot of work and tracking, particularly signing up and managing Squidoo and Gather, however, they are helping my site get ranked highly. Excellent presentation.
Very cool and informativ article! I will try some of this stuff later today – good stuff dude!
Interesting article (many links that I’ve yet to read) but still not sure what backlinks are and how they differ from just links. According to Google support, backlinks are links to a blog post from another blog but I don’t believe this to be the whole picture. The SunSeeker Doors site has many links but apparently no backlinks according to a free checker tool I used earlier.
An associated website framelessglassdoorsuk used an agency to build links which initially worked very well but recently the site has disappeared from view so they obviously used dodgy tactics and are no longer being used!
Glen,
My wife and I were just introduced to your website. She has been getting your business ideas. Now seeing you give all the advice how to market it and make it profitable is just amazing. I watched your viperchill.com/blueprint series twice now and each time I gained something new.
Thank you so much you are an inspiration. We believe in paying it forward and I can not wait to be able to inspire like you do.
Thank You
JW
Hi Glen,
Thanks for the info. I have just started a brave task after building 1 website in the past to building 5 at once. The last week I have been thinking about back links so this will be my first one, yeah! I do like the quote “search engines follow people!”. I did decide to slowly add quality content and spend 1 day a week working on back links for each site individually. Its a shame their isn’t a easier way and I remember spending days researching this over a year ago and I am still none the wiser because they are to many scammers out there.
Anyway, Cheers Ed
I really think this article is well-written. I am having alot of trouble trying to find good backlinks to my site. I will start from what is learnt here.
Thanks for this informative article
Glen,
Thanks for the great info. I am boot strapping a start up in a very competitive industry and will refer back to this article often.
Hey nice informative post. Thanks for sharing specially that flippa auction trick I will surely try it and Thanks Alot.
This is a great read. I have been researching SEO for a while. A family member of mine bought an SEO site to sell backlinks about five months ago. The website was trash when he got it. I have been working on it to try to improve all aspects including SEO to the site itself. I was new at this at first but I feel like I am coming along. Let me know what you think of the site. I was trying to rank for the phrase “cheap backlinks”. I have been looking for a consult.
Thanks Branden
Great Article. Thanks for sharing. Has much changed over the last two years? or do you feel the tips are still current?
I have not been visitng this site lately. Was here the last few days and didnt left a comment. I check back again and found more great insights both from you and the guest comments as well. Excellent Post. Keep up the good work! I have bookmarked this site
Great advice – “Building Links Around One Phrase” is especially true now with the Penguin update.
Awesome man. Never seen such detailed information on any other site. The Flippa idea is really cool. Can you tell me how can i find backlinks of competitor in google. Is it the same as Yahoo method?
This is one of my favorite blogging sites right now.
Thanks for the great content!
great advice on building links. will implement these on my own website.
Great Content. Very Helpful indeed. Thanks.
this is a great post but I wonder if you would change anything after Google Penguin update….
Very useful info. Thank you for sharing
I am glad I found this website!
Thanks for all the great tips! Will definitely try them out!
This website is very helpful to me. nice work. Now, I know what I should do.
My new site jumped to PR2 right away, but my other website which has been going for over 10 years and has lots of good content is stuck in PR 3. Still working on it and appreciate tips like yours.
I came to know that backlinks are very important to get the page rank. I was searching this kind of post which can help newbies like me to help in getting backlinks and know how best and fast we can create backlinks. I have now started following the tips and lets see whether I can make more links.
Thanks a lot for the information.
Thank you for the post! It’s important to understand you need to do a variety of things to build links and not depend on one source. It also takes time to build traffic. It’s not going to happen overnight but if you work on SEO consistently and build a nice site, traffic will increase gradually.
Guest posting is the best one.
Excellent ideas, I have bookmarked your site to constanly review it.
Thanks,
Hernan.
Excellent points and engaging content! Great strategies for any webmaster to build a strong and lasting SEO campaign! Definitely passing this on! Thank you.
10x very much for your article …It very helpful for someone who just start to learn SEO
Cheers for this post I have bookmarked and come back regularly!
Wonderful article. I just started a blog and the tips presented here are definitely helpful. Thank You.
I’ve noticed that people take the same article and post it in many places. I heard that Google will now be penalizing for this. Is that true?
Hi Glen, thanks for the article. I like your idea on finding sites on Flippa but can you tell me what tool do you recommend for finding backlinks? I was using linkdiagnosis but it shows that one of my competitors only has 2 backlinks and they rank 12th on a very competitive keyword (???) – doesn’t make much sense to me.
Cheers, Dave
I love your article.very helpfull for me because i just start learn seo..thank u so much…
Hey there, Thanks for sharing awesome tips regarding backlink building, you made my day
Great post! I’m always sharing on social media sites! Facebook, Blog Engage and Twitter are my main sites to use. I also enjoy blog commenting a lot and in fact is why I found your blog and why I’m posting a comment. I do enjoy guest blogging but I feel at times it’s a lot of work and if you don’t have a lot of time it may not be the best ROI but it’s 00% we should all at least try.
awesome, sir, it is excellent. thanks for information
Thanks for sharing us your thoughts on how we can effectively build link and get a better response to our website. Owning and managing our own blog is also an investment which means it is something that we need to protect and make it grow. Again, more power!
Hey I know this is off topic but I was wondering if you knew of any widgets I could
add to my blog that automatically tweet my newest twitter updates.
I’ve been looking for a plug-in like this for quite some time and was hoping maybe you would have some experience with something like this. Please let me know if you run into anything. I truly enjoy reading your blog and I look forward to your new updates.
Hi , just found this blog and wanted to say that you have some great posts and well done for everything that you have achieved. Also thanks for the free guides.
Regards
Wow, awesome article, very well informed! I will be sure to try some of them out. Again thanks for sharing!
Would you say these tactics still work in late 2012? Thanks.
Learn something new every day
thanks
Great ideas for backlinks here. Just shows that quality wins in the end and not to cram crappy backlinks. I’ve never thought about using competitiors backlinks (!). I also hadn’t seen that Yahoo search before either. I will definately be trying it. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing these tips. its a comprehensive idea and brighten me up on how to increase backlinks on my blog. This is a great stuff for me. Thanks again for having this thoughts available to us readers. Have a good day!
Thanks for the great info… I’ll definitely be implementing these techniques to improve my ranking.
Cheers, Si.
Thanks for sharing this, actually I also saw something like what you have mentioned about “search engines follow people.” before. And I agree with you that it refers to External links vs. Internal links. You can get more trust from search engines if your site is getting more external links rather then internal links.
Good job for sharing these info to us.
Alot of good advice and great practices!
ive been putting most to the test as of recent with my new glass tile comapny.
I worked on a fitness venture and had amazing results with presss releases! havent gone that route yet thought on this project
thanks for the arcitcle, Glen. I’m gonna use these to improve my website. Thanks again.
Thank you so much for the post, your insights on link building helped me gain confidence on how to build quality back links and build my page rank! Thank You!
I realize this post was written quite a while ago, but I still found a couple things that will be useful to me. Thanks!
It was really informative and helped alot ! Thanks for posting .
Thanks Glen, it’s very helpful article for SEO
Great article, but I have done the Squidoo and the Ezine articles but I find that Google is not crawling them at all. Can anyone explain why this is happening? Is there some kind of ban of Squidoo or Ezine?
Thanks for the useful info. What would you consider as too many backlinks, too fast? Thanks
I think this a best post I read on link building, learn a lot of thing about Google activity on create back link for website or blog. Thanks for such good post.
Great post, very helpful and cleared all my doubts, also guest posting is an idea which I just now achieved being a newbie.
Thnks
Thanks so much for this amazing compilation resource for link building! Honestly, I think it’s incredible that you are giving this kind of complete breakdown for free. It’s going to make a great to do list on my link building days. Great reference.
This is my first time at viper chill and I really appreciate the quality here. I’m still learning how to get the word out in my business and this is very, very helpful. Thanks.
Thank you, I found this post very useful.
Thanks for the info. I definitely will apply all of these steps to help my website grow. Again thanks Viperchill!
Hey Glen, just happened upon your site while I was messing around in CisionPoint. I really enjoyed this post. Too often people freak out over the latest (or possibly the next) Google algo update. They forget that if you just do your work for your audience it shouldn’t matter what Google decides. Search is only one piece of the puzzle anyway. If you have something important to say, people will find it. Cheers!
Really helpful article, thanks
Glen, a question hits my mind – what about Alex websites links? For example, if we go to a good ranking website and check it’s ‘site linking in’ from alexa tool – we will get a plenty of websites and then we can check backlinks of them? – let me know
Hello Glen,
Can you please authorise my post?
Aside from Article sites and forum signatures a lot of what you’ve said here still rings true, I hope that you are still doing well because you were definitely employing the white-hat tactics back then. You must have been one of the first SEO’s to realise that you are no longer chasing the search engine but chasing the visitors. It’s always been about providing the best customer journey and experience it’s just a shame that many SEO’s got lost along the way.
Excellent post as always Glen! I’m working on building back-links for my first niche website and this post has literally been my bible. Thanks for the killer content!
Excellent, informative article Glen. I’m starting a site of my own, and all your tips will go to good use. Hopefully soon I’ll stumble across a great idea for an article!
I totally agree with your tactic in link building and seo. The unique content is a solution for expert users, and competitors can give lot of information about their techniques.
Just rereading this post, and will be referencing this for use in the future. Always great content, Glen.
Marvellous post Glen ! You have covered all the important things which are must to do for a blogger to rank higher in SERPs. But we should keep in mind always that , Content is the only king here.
Can you please tell me the command to query for competitors backlink in google search?
Fantastic no BS post Glen. Also, absolutely loved the WSO review PDF you shared with me in the same email – opened my eyes to alot about the warrior forum. Great resource here – thanks for sharing.
Great post Glen… No link this time
Acquiring paid do follow links is the current trend to dominate Google in 2013. Although Guest Posting is great methodology to build links but the one worked for me was to create WordPress Plugins and WordPress Widgets that fetched me thousands of quality backlinks.
I really liked the idea of checking the competitors backlinks, i havent thought about it before , but its an awesome idea, cause if i get even better links then them first spot can be mine
This is STILL a great post! I read it a while back and had to revisit – I am looking for some strategies, and I love the idea about interviewing someone high-profile.
Thanks for the great insight!
Awesome article Glen, very nice explanation and mention very important thing to get good SERPs and PR. Thanks for the informative post…
Hey Glen, thanks for another post.
Most of my income comes from SEO for business so I know exactly why your competitor’s backlinks are so important. I am ranking pages by analyzing the competition and buying the same backlinks. It’s like candy from a baby!
Another big up to Viper Chill!
Sanj.
I have been studying SEO as well. I checked out your article to compare my findings with yours. They are very similar! The only thing that I found different was article posting can actually hurt your rankings. I have been focusing on attracting blog followers rather than focusing solely upon search engines. Content is king!
Hi Glen
Great article, so, so informative. It’s my first time reading your blog and I already love it to bits! You’re a master piece bro!
OMG! It didn’t even cross my mind you’re from South Africa! Proud of you home-boy!
Just launched my blog and I’m about to move into full on link building/marketing mode. A lot of great tips in here I never even knew. Guess that’s why you’re the expert!
Who knew my random Facebook friend was an SEO wizard?
Hi Glen!
I hope your enjoying your trip to Singapore so far? It must be awesome to be able to travel around the globe at your young age?
I can only imagine what that must be like. At 58 years old I can tell you this, “I would give all the tea in China to be in your shoes my friend”!
Glen you have done a great job with this site, and your insight with SEO is right on point from what I have read thus far.
Well, I am going to get back to my reading, I enjoy reading something as informative as this.
I build WordPress sites in various niches and sell them when someone is interested. I’, retired though so I don’t push it. I give me the best deals I can, and I try to give them the best product possible for their money.
Helping others is very rewarding Glen, as I am sure you know because you do it daily!
Keep up the great work your doing Glen, enjoy life my friend, be safe, and as always, God Bless You!
David
Thanks Glen for the helpful article, it’s much appreciated. Some great nuggets like checking your competitors back links, and things not to do while building your site.
Well, I found this article shared on stumbleupon, and I enjoyed every minute reading it. Of-course you did nothing else but just talk about some of well-known methods of link building, but you explained them very well, and I appreciated that. Also was nice to include a list of what NOT to do, great article mate !
Hi Glen
Thank-you so much for all of this information. As a “newbie” to understanding SEO and how it works, I was glad that your page ranked high enough for me to find what I was looking for!
Keep up the good work.
Susan