the Blogoholic

Photo by Bogdan Suditu

Almost every serious webmaster knows that the real money is in backlinks. The more you have, the higher your site will rank in the search engines, and ultimately you’ll make more money.

Let’s say there are two sites with backlinks of the same quality. One of them has 10,00 backlinks, and the other one has 50,000 backlinks. Which one do you think Google is going to consider more important? Obviously the one with 50,000 backlinks.

But then again, quantity isn’t everything. The quality of the backlinks is another important factor that search engines take into consideration when ranking your site. For example, let’s say we have two technology blogs. One has 1,000 backlinks from sites like TechCruch, Lifehacker, ArsTechnica, Gizmodo etc. and the other blog has 5,000+ backlinks from a few unknown technology blogs. Who do you think will rank higher in the search engines? The first one of course.

Quality and quantity are just two of the many factors search engines use to rank a site. Other factors are the anchor text, topic of the blog, age of the domain, PageRank of the blog and tons of others. But what we will focus on right now is the quantity of backlinks. You see, the thing about backlinks is that you can never get enough of them. Even if you reach #1 in Google, a couple of more thousand backlinks won’t do any harm. So, how exactly do you build thousands of backlinks towards your site for free?

That’s what we’ll be looking at today. Here are 7 methods that may result if thousands of free backlinks: Use them at your own risk.

Link Exchanges With 1000-Paged Websites

I bet you’ve been told a thousand times by everyone and their dog that link exchanges are a great way to get backlinks. But I’m sure that none of them have ever told you which sites you should exchange links with. You see, there’s no point exchanging links with a site that only has 10 indexed pages in Google (assuming you’re exchanging sidebar links). Because in the end, you’ll only be getting 10 measly links from that website. So how do you see if a site has many indexed pages or not? Easy, just go to Google and type in this search query: site:www.sitenamehere.com

That’s sit, this will show you the number of indexed pages the site has in the topish-right corner of the page.

Do-Follow Blog Commenting (the Blogoholic Way)

Commenting on do follow blogs has always a great method to get free backlinks. But there are two problems with this method: a) You won’t be able to use your keyword as anchor text 99.9% of the time - b) The blog owner may decide to make the comment section nofollow and there’s nothing you can about it. Okay, so what’s so new about this method? Nothing really, it’s just the way you do it. Since you’re not using your keyword as anchor text, blog owners will pay less attention to comments that seem “out of the ordinary”

Here’s what you do: First install the Firefox plugin easyComment. This will help you automatically fill in the comment fields to save you time. Fill in the Name, Website, and Email fields as you wish, but for the message field, here’s what to write:

“Hey, just thought you might wanna know that your blogs looks funny in Safari browser”

Now just open up a list of do follow blogs and submit this message to every single one you find. That’s all there is to it! Within days you will have hundreds of do follow links pointing to your website! If this is too “unethical” or “greyhat” for you, then simply don’t do it!

Use Forum Signatures

If you are a member on a forum (who isn’t?) and have thousands of posts, then you should be using your signature to promote to build links towards your blog. Now I understand that many of you like to use their signatures for other reasons, but here’s the thing, all you need is a link to your site. A great way to do this and stay unnoticed is to set the font size to small and make the anchor text of the link a simple “dot”. That way, you’ll build thousands of backlinks towards your site while still keeping the ability to use your signature for other purposes.

Set Up Automated Blogs

Setting up an automated blog that automatically syndicates other blog’s feeds is a great way to build backlinks. You see, if the blog makes 50 new posts a day, and you link to your site from the blog’s sidebar, then that’s 100 new links everyday. Set up a few more of those blogs and you’ll be getting thousands of links in no time. Here’s a tutorial that shows you how to set up an automated video site, as long as your getting more pages indexed, then you’re getting more links.

Sponsor WordPress Themes

Sponsoring WordPress themes can be a fantastic source of free (and high quality) backlinks. The important thing to remember here is to sponsors the themes that you know will get a lot of downloads and be installed on tons of blogs. Also, don’t sponsor theme that are selling more than 2 links, that will just be a waste of money.

Some great themes have brought in millions (yes, millions) of backlinks towards the designer’s website. Just goes to show that the more work you put into it, the more you backlinks you get.

Create a Useful WordPres Plugin

There are millions of WordPress blogs all over the Internet. What would happen if you could create a plugin that almost every one of them would like to use? (Fine, not every single one, but most.) Well, considering that you would have included a small link in your plugin back to your website (cForms is an example of this), you just scored yourself tens of thousands of free backlinks.

Simple? Well, yes and no. First of all, not everybody knows how to make their own WordPress plugin, secondly, what on earth would tens of thousands of blogs need? But with a bit of research and asking around on forums, I’m sure you can eventually come up with something.

By the way, I know that I said you’ll be getting these backlinks for free. But once you pay for the cost of developing the plugin, you’ll have nothing other than the promotion to do!

Create a Widget That Will Go Viral!

Why do you think sites that show your Google PageRank have such a high PR? Well, it’s because every time someone wants to display his site’s PR, they give him a code that shows it along with a link to their site. Can you imagine how many people put up these widgets? Or take twittercounter.com as an example. The owners thought of something people would probably like to use and created it. Now there site has a PageRank 5 and over 2 million backlinks!

Better yet, you can create something you know that people in your niche will want to put up their blogs. Not only will this get you free backlinks, but it will also get you targeted and related ones as well. (Which Google pays more attention to.)

Using the above methods has the potential to bring your site thousands of backlinks within months (or weeks, depending on how hard you work). Whether you use them or not, that’s up to you. I showed you the way, now it’s your turn to take action and start building links!

Oh, and keep a lookout for the tomorrow’s post that discusses the #1 reason that people don’t make money online (and how to get over it). I’ll also be talking about a few forum marketing tactics during the next few days as well as a step-by-step guide that teaches beginners how to make money online fast. Just one more thing, my eBook that teaches you how to make $500/week will be released soon, so stay tuned for that!