How’d you like to see my secret stash of untapped authority backlinks that I personally use to rank for competitive keywords?
Well consider yourself very lucky…
…because today I’m going to pull back the curtain and share some of my absolute BEST sources with you.
Warning: you are NOT going to find anything about article directories (blah) or blog comments (yawn) here.
I’m bringing the noise.
1. Submit to Audio Sharing Sites
SEOs never use audio sharing sites…which is CRAZY because they’re ridiculously easy to get backlinks from.
And make no mistake: these audio sharing sites are PageRank powerhouses that can move your site in the SERPs.
All you need to do is create a piece of audio (preferably music) and upload it to these sites, which give you a nice dofollow link in exchange:
Reverbnation.com (PR6)
BandCamp.com (PR7)
Sutros.com (PR5)
YourListen.com (PR5)
Here’s an example (live dofollow link):
Even if you have as much music talent as MC Hammer you can still take advantage of this technique.
Just hit ‘record’ on your laptop mic and belt out Radiohead covers or beat-box like you do in your car.
These files aren’t usually screened by people so you don’t have to worry about winning a Grammy.
Just record something, upload it, and grab your authority links.
2. Donate to Charity
If the warm fuzzy feeling you get from donating isn’t enough, maybe a backlink will cajole your altruistic side.
There are a ton of broke PR6 site owners that will gladly hand over a link in exchange for a few bucks. And these sites tend to have ridiculous link profiles.
Take a look at this PR7 site that I got a link from last week:
How much would you pay for a link on a site like this?
$100? $500?
How about $12. This site requires a measly 12 dollar donation for a link on their contributors page (which is a PR5).
I love you man, but I can’t out the sites that I donate to (I don’t want them to get spammed).
You can find some on your own by using these nifty search strings:
“donate to us”
“contributors page”
“sponsors page”
allintitle: “contributors”
allintitle: “sponsors”
3. Blogger Reviews
If you have a a software product, information product, consulting service or ANYTHING of value that you sell, you can easily turn that into handfuls of high-quality backlinks.
How?
By offering it to bloggers for free.
Here’s how:
1. Find bloggers in your niche that might be interested in what you have to offer. If you sell an information product that teaches people how to make their own soaps, you’d Google things like “soap making”, “make soap at home” etc.
2. Your results will be a mixed bag of mommy bloggers, hippie bloggers, and sites like ehow.
Filter out any major authority sites or news sites. You’ll be left with a solid list bloggers that will probably be interested in your offer, like this one:
3. Reach out to them with this email script:
Hey (site owner name),
I was searching for some homepage soap recipes today when I came across (site name).
Awesome stuff!
Actually, I just launched a guide that teaches people how to make luxury soaps at home. I usually charge $X, but I’d be more than happy to send it over to you on the house. All I’d ask is that you’d consider mentioning it on your blog or writing a review.
Let me know how that sounds.
Cheers,
Your name
You need to be VERY careful about the language you use when sending people your product.
Note how I don’t ask for a link or review…which would violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. I just send them the product and let them decide if it’s worth a mention on their blog.
4. Give Testimonials
Companies big and small LOVE to show off their customer testimonials. If you’re using a product or service that you love (or at least like), consider sending them a testimonial.
When you do, make sure to tell them that they can put it on their homepage or a testimonial page. To show that you’re a real person they’ll often put a link to your site for you…without you even having to ask.
Make no mistake, you can get some baller backlinks from testimonials (this one here is on a PR6 page):
When I see an authority site with testimonial links I sometimes buy their product just to give a testimonial and get a link.
5. Fiverr Blog Backlinks
It’s very fashionable to hate on Fiverr because 99% of their SEO gigs are absolute garbage.
But the 1% that’s left is solid gold bullion.
The key is knowing how to find the 1%.
When I want to get backlinks at Fiverr I’m hunting for ONE specific type of gig: a webmaster who is selling a contextual link on his site.
That’s it.
No link wheels. No link pyramid. No link hexagons. No crap.
And if you look hard enough there are site owners on Fiverr that have absolutelyno clue how much a link on their site is worth.
Here’s the link profile from a site I got a link from the other day (PR4):
Not bad, eh?
For this level of quality you’ll usually have to provide the content yourself (no biggie).
And while this may seem like traditional guest posting, it’s a VERY different ballgame because:
- You don’t have to follow any fascist “guest posting guidelines”
- You can write content optimized around your keyword
- You can drop links wherever and however you like
- You usually get your guest post posted within a day or so
Luckily, finding these gigs is a cinch.
Just type these into Fiverr’s search field:
“I will post your content”
“guest post on my”
“I will post your article”
6. Directory Domination
I chuckle every time people claim that directories are dead.
In May 2012 Google deindexed a few hundred free directories. If directory links didn’t work then why would they deindex them?
Hint: they wouldn’t.
This matches my personal experience: links from the right directories can stilldo wonders for your site.
And because web directories are seen as “old-fashioned” in the SEO world, you can usually get high PR links from aged domains for next to nothing.
Here are some directories to consider submitting to:
Free:
MavicaNET
Paid:
Yahoo! Directory (expensive but worth it)
7. HARO
HARO (short for Help a Reporter Out) is one of best ways to get killer backlinks from authority news sites.
Here’s how HARO works:
1. Sign Up To HARO as a source here.
2. You’ll get three emails per day from reporters looking for sources, like this one:
3. Respond with your credentials and some helpful tips.
Easy right? You give a reporter a tailored response and they’ll hook you up with a link.
Don’t sleep on HARO.
Backlinko reader Sameep Shah got a link to his web design business from Inc.com (DA92) using HARO:
8. .Edu Resource Backlinks
Everyone knows that .edu links are the bomb.
But aren’t legit .edu links impossible for Average Joe SEO?
Fortunately not.
If you have a legit looking site that’s not monetized to death you can usually get a 1-2 .edu links just by asking around.
Here’s how.
Most universities have resource pages where they link to websites that are helpful to students and faculty. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you had a website web design. You could get a link from the example above (Cookman.edu) by emailing them and showing them your helpful resource.
Use these search strings to find them:
site:.edu “your keyword”
site:.edu “your keyword” + “resources”
site:.edu: “your keyword” + inurl:links
site:.edu: “your keyword” + “other sites”
Only 5-10% of them will actually post your link. But keep in mind that a handful of these links can make a HUGE difference in the SERPs.
9. Submit Your Site to Website Feedback Sites
There are a TON of sites that are designed to help you get feedback on your site’s layout or conversion potential. Important for our purposes, all of them allow a dofollow link back to your site.
Here’s an example from a site called ConceptFeedback.com:
As you can see, there’s a nice dofollow link on the page.
All you need to do is submit your site with a little description of how you want to improve it.
Here are some Website Feedback Sites that you can use:
ConceptFeedback.com (PR3)
BounceApp.com (PR5)
SuggestionBox.com (PR4)
Criticue.com (PR3)
10. The Moving Man Method
Here’s a strategy that’s absolutely perfect for ecommerce sites (but it also works well for blogs).
In fact, I used the Moving Man Method to score Grade-A contextual links from a handful of authoritative domains (including DA87 .edu site)
Pretty sweet, right?
Here’s the step-by-step process.
1. First, find sites that have moved or gone out of business.
The easiest way to do this is to keep your ear to the ground. When you hear that a company has gone under, it’s time to swoop in.
For example, in my case, I read that an SEO agency called BlueGlass suddenly went out of business. That’s when I realized that there were probably hundreds of sites linking to a site that no longer existed.
If you want to be more proactive, you can use search strings like:
“keyword” + “out of business”
“keyword” + rebrand”
“keyword” + “has moved”
2. Next, find the sites and pages liking to the old business or site.
This is super-simple if you use a program like ahrefs, Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO.
Just take the URL of the old site and pop it into your tool of choice:
And — bingo! — you’ll have a list of pages linking to a site that moved or isn’t there anymore.
3. Finally, reach out and let the site owners know about their outdated link…
…and pitch a link to your site as a replacement.
Here’s a script that works well for me:
Hey NAME,
I was looking for information on TOPIC today when I stumbled onto your site.
I couldn’t help but notice that you were linking to OLD SITE. As you may have heard, they went out of business a few months back.
Actually, I have a guide on my site that’s really similar: URL.
Might make a nice replacement for the OLD SITE link.
Thanks,
YOUR NAME
11. Submit Your Site to Blog Aggregators
You can get a dofollow link on most blog aggregators for free in three easy steps:
- Submit your site
- Add a special HTML code to your site to confirm that you’re the owner
- Wait for someone from the aggregator to stop by and take a look at your site
When they approve it you’ll have your own page on the aggregator with a dofollow link to your site. Easy peasy.
In addition to Technorati (a must) here are some other blog aggregators to submit to:
Alltop.com (PR7)
Blogarama.com (PR2)
12. Find Guest Posting Gigs on Twitter
If there really is a hell, I’m convinced that Satan makes tortured souls guest post for all of eternity.
It can take hours just to find a handful of sites that don’t have a strict laundry list of guest blogger guidelines.
But there’s an easier way. You can tap into the underutilized power of Twitter search to find sites that are posting guest posts on the reg.
Here’s what I mean:
You KNOW that the sites that have tweeted their guest posts in the last week must be posting on a regular basis (no annoying dead ends!).
Here are some search strings to use in Twitter search:
“your niche” + guest post
“your niche” + guest author
“your niche” + write for us
“your niche” + guest article
13. Scoop It
Scoop It is one of my absolute favorite ways of building backlinks with a few minutes of work.
Scoop It is basically a site where people aggregate their favorite content around the web into a magazine format.
Here’s an example of a Scoop it page:
Lots of people’s personal Scoop It pages are PR3 or higher.
To get people to post your stuff all you need to do is use Scoop It’s built in suggestion feature.
Just search for a high PR Scoop It page and hit “suggest”. You’ll see something like this:
Just send the person a quick message and let them know about your content.
In my experience about 50% accept within a day –meaning dozens of authority backlinks in about 15 minutes of “work”.
14. Broken Link Building
This strategy is similar to the Moving Man Method I outlined above.
The difference is that with broken link building, you’re only looking for pages that are 404ing.
Moved businesses and companies that changed names won’t show up with this approach.
That being said, it’s definitely worth the time and effort because of the killer inbound links you can get from this strategy.
What we’re doing is finding resource pages in our niche. So if we were in the fitness niche you’d search in Google using these search strings:
“fitness” + “resource page”
“fitness” + “resources”
“fitness” + “recommended sites”
“fitness” + “links”
And find pages like this:
Or like this page (any page with a lot of outbound links is a good target):
Now you COULD email them and just ask for a link. But I’ve found that the begging approach doesn’t work very well.
Instead, give the site owner a hand by letting him know about any broken links that you happen to find.
You can easily find the broken links on any page. Just use the nifty Chrome Extension Check My Links.
This program quickly finds any broken links the page happens to have. It also highlights them in red to make them easy to find:
Hi (site owner name),
I was just browsing around your resources page today, and among the lists of great resources, were some broken links.
Here’s a few of them:
URL1
URL2
URL3
Oh, and I have a website, mysite.com, that also regularly posts quality content related to whatever. If you think so too, feel free to post a link to it on your resources page.
Either way I hope this helps and keep up the good work!
Thanks,
(Your Name)
15. Infographics
Almost everyone in SEO knows about infographics, but I’m absolutelyflabbergasted at how few take advantage of this incredibly easy link building strategy.
That’s because many people assume that infographics are expensive and hard to make.
And they assume the infographic has to go viral for this technique to work.
Fortunately for us, both of these assumptions are DEAD WRONG.
Heck, you can get a halfway decent infographic made from someone on Odesk or Elance for less than $250. In my experience, the IDEA is 10x more important than the design itself.
Be creative, make something unique, and then hire a cheap designer to make it for you (you can also do it yourself using tools like Piktochart).
Once you have it ready, it’s time to get the word out.
1. Your first step is to submit it to infographic sharing sites, like these:
Visual.ly (PR7)
DailyInfoGraphic.com (PR5)
AmazingInfoGraphics.com (PR4)
OmgInfoGraphics.com (PR3)
2. Then reach out to bloggers in your niche and offer them the infographic as a guest post. To sweeten the deal, tell them that you’ll write a unique description for their site.
I’ve literally gotten 100+ high PR backlinks from related sites from a single quality infographic and this 1-2 punch.
16. The Skyscraper Technique
It’s no secret that amazing content makes link building 10x easier.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to know what TYPES of great content actually get results.
Enter: The Skyscraper Technique.
It’s a strategy I’ve used to literally double my search engine traffic in 2-weeks:
Here’s how it works:
1. Identify content in your industry that’s performed well in terms of generating backlinks, social shares and blog comments.
2. Make something that blows the piece of content you found out of the water.
3. Reach out to the people that linked to the now-inferior piece of content.
You can read a step-by-step case study of the process in action here:http://backlinko.com/white-hat-seo
17. Google+ Profile
Did you know that your Google+ profile allows contextual, dofollow links?
(Note, you have to be signed out of Google+ to see the link as dofollow. Weird but true).
Here’s an example:
With enough interaction within Google+ and direct linking to your profile, you can make that a pretty powerful link.
For example, Mark Cuban’s Google Plus Profile page is PR4!
Now It’s Your Turn
Now it’s time to actually put these powerful strategies into practice.http://backlinko.com/17-untapped-backlink-sources
No comments:
Post a Comment