A Simple Yet Effective Link Building Technique That You Might Have Overlooked
Make no mistake folks, link building is a very important aspect in getting traffic from Google. Many of you guys and gals read my personal blog and I spend quite a bit of time talking about building micro niche blogs and targeting keywords that don’t require backlinks. While that is true, in a way that also limits you from capitalizing on prime keywords. Ranking for prime keywords are definitely in your reach; however, this can not be archived without launching a well thought out and well researched link building campaign.
So how do you launch an effective link building campaign? Well, really for many of you reading this, the problem is finding sites that will willingly add your link to their pages. But if you think about this for a second, you very well may already have a huge source of sites to use at your disposal. How many web sites or blogs do you have? Is there any reason why you’re not using your own web sites or blogs to help build backlinks to another blog or web site of yours?
I do this all the time! Granted, I have friends who’ll add my link to certain blogs posts upon request, but a large percentage of my link building comes from my own internal fleet of blogs. There is nothing wrong with using your existing blogs or web sites to help build up the number of backlinks to another blog or web site that you own.
What about doing this on sites that all share the same IP address? Well, that’s a good question… I am glad I asked myself that. Here are my thoughts about that. If you are in the business of building sites with the aim of trying to get them to rank high in the SERPs then you really need to do things right and be organized with how you distribute your sites among different servers. Granted, I think a lot of the myth about having multiple sites on the same IP might be slightly over-rated.
But guess what? I can’t prove that! I don’t work at Google. I don’t have their magical formula. There is one thing that I do know, and that is the cost of web hosting. When I started building web sites, hosting was expensive! Today, you can order web hosting for as little as $4.95 / month! So, to answer your question about having multiple sites on the same IP address, I’ll say this. I can’t prove that this is good or bad, but seeing how cheap web hosting is today, why risk it? Be organized, and distribute your sites among different servers.
Having that said, let’s talk about how to build backlinks to your web sites and blogs by using your own sites. When you determine which keywords that you want to start using to plug links to a certain site or blog of yours, simply do a Google search for that keyword on your site to see how many instances are there.
Example: site:yourname.com “keyword phrase”
When you do that, Google will return a list of web pages or blog posts on your site or blog that where that keyword is used. If the page or post is older, you can almost guarantee that there will be a little bit of PageRank on that page as well. Go back and edit this page or post and plug your link to point to the blog or site that you are trying to build links to.
If you are like me and use WordPress blogs and want to do this automatically, then there is a very handy plugin that will soon become your best friend. The plugin is called aLinks and unfortunately the web site has been down for several months. The only place I have found where you can download this plugin is HERE. aLinks is a plugin that allows you to automatically link keywords on your blog and point them to any destination that you want. It’s one of my personal favorites.
Anyway, I hope that you found this article to be helpful. What are some other creative ways to build backlinks to your site? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts!
November 4th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Hey Garry, great post.
I’ve always linked my blogs together. Although I never thought about having them stem from the same IP. And as for links, I’ve found that the best way to gain links is through the various social networks I belong to. If I find a post relating to my site’s niche, and it’s a good article, I’ll link to it which usually causes that person to reciprocate by adding a link back to my blog from theirs. So far, it’s worked wonders for me.
Thanks again
November 4th, 2008 at 3:33 am
Hi Garry, great article. Building links by using own blogs is also effective. but I still have 10 blogs.I am working to create blogs for building links now. I have downloaded useful alinks wp plugin. Thanks for the download links.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Thanks for answering that question. Ive been wondering about it for some time. Actually this post confirmed a suspicion Ive had and re-affirmed a course of action I took. Didnt know about the plugin though, wish I had a bout a month ago.
Great post g-man
November 4th, 2008 at 6:28 am
Great post Garry,
Google SEO isn’t an exact science, so I can share only my personal (not exactly proofable) opinion:
1. backlinks from different IP’s works better, altough a backlink from a shared IP is better then NO backlink.
2. one way links work better then reciprocal links (A links to B, B links to A). To take advantage of this situation you can build your network in circular way (A links to B, B links to C, C links to A) avoiding reciprocal links.
3. a backlink from a related page counts more as an backlink from an unrelated page. Altough having backlinks also from unrelated pages make you advance in the SERPS. Anyway it’s very important the anchor text of the backlink.
ciao
alexander
November 4th, 2008 at 7:07 am
This article is very useful really in building up backlinks to your blogs/sites. I find the tips well explained and very easy implement.Nice work sir! Is aLink compatible with BLOGGER sir?
Thanks!
November 4th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Excellent post Garry – thanks for the insights.
Kent F.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Of course you have to 1) have multiple sites, and 2) they need to be somewhat related. A site on dolls linking to a site about CD rates probably wouldn’t help much. :O)
I have begun to add links from old posts to other places on the blog and site. It will be interesting to see how that goes.
Great idea for bloggers who do have multiple sites.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I also use my other blogs to build links for my other blogs. However my other blogs don’t have big votes from google so I really don’t think they are helping me much. Although I could be wrong.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Those are great tips, to be sure, but I have something to add about domains that are hosted on the same IP: Google records the IP of everything in its cache, so if there are multiple sites, all of which link to each other, on the same IP address, it’s a pretty good bet they know that the owner is the same. Even sites with different IPs that are all linking to each other are in danger of being recognized as being owned by a single entity… All of this is made worse by any content that is duplicated between domains, so try to stay away from that too.
November 4th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Thanks for all the awesome comments! I am very happy that you enjoyed the article. Much more to come, so stay tuned!
November 5th, 2008 at 1:29 am
OFF TOPIC:
hey Garry, about the theme you’re using on this blog, I think that alterning small and normal font sizes for the comments isn’t good and reader-friendly. Some comments get so small that they’re hardly readable.
ciao
alex
November 5th, 2008 at 1:32 am
I agree with you totally… I’ll have to go down to Houston and figure out which one of their million servers the blog is hosted on and pull all the cords. lol
Seriously though, thanks for the feedback, I am going talk to Chad about it and see if I can pitch in a little bit and fix a few things up.
November 6th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Registering all the blogs in different names, addresses, and contact info is probably the only way to remain “under the radar.”
In addition, roping all of your blogs together and to a small handful of sites that are “receiving” the backlinks, in my opinion, is a bit like roping off the scene with bright yellow Crime Scene tape. Not terribly subtle.
stevie black
November 6th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
wow.. i never thought i’ve overlooked that.. thanks.. your a life saver..
November 7th, 2008 at 12:53 am
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November 7th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Hi Garry,
Good post and a great reminder on the importance of backlinks. Something that needs to be done continually but all so often gets forgotten about in the mad rush to get everything else done.
Regards,
Murray
December 6th, 2008 at 4:56 am
This is a gud idea. I will try.
Thanks.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Garry,
This is great stuff. I think we can use this method for some very natural link exchanges with friends and other bloggers too. People tend to be lazy when you asked them to do a couple of natural link exchanges on each others’ posts. But if you take the effort to provide a list of their posts that have your keywords, they probably would readily do such exchanges with you. After all they know they benefit too.
Peter Lee
April 10th, 2009 at 4:49 am
good tips! u really enlightened me in SEO field. A lot of what has been explained here answer my questions. keep up the good work