Hey all! As you can see by my post count I'm quite new to these forums, and since my real interest is SEO, I thought I'd offer a quick link building tip that I hope you all can use.
As anyone who owns a website where there is a 'comments' section will probably testify, moderating spammy comments can be a nuisance. However, the 'spam' folder in WordPress can be a potential gold mine of linking opportunities.
What I'll do is go through my spam comments folder in WP and find a random generic crappy comment that has probably been blasted to millions of websites around the web. For example, just this morning I found this little beauty:
"Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I find It really useful & it helped me out much. I hope to give something back and help others like you helped me."
It's a blatant spun comment that's probably been blasted out through some automated SEO tool. So, I'll try and use it to my advantage. I'll copy a section of the comment and paste it in Google – I'll only use a section of the comment because Google limits searches to 32 words. Importantly, I'll wrap the search in double quotes so Google only returns results featuring the exact text I'm searching for.
When I hit the search button, I'll be presented with a list of websites that have approved this comment - they are all potential link sources. For the quote above, Google (UK) returned about 5 million results.
I'll fine-tune my search my using SEO Quake (a free tool everyone should use!) to analyse the SERPs and find sites with a high PR. Chances are there won't be loads, but for my search I found a couple of PR 3-4 sites and a good number of PR 2's. Again, it's easy enough to leave a comment at these sites and get a link.
You can fine-tune your search even further by prefixing (or suffixing…yeah, that's how I roll) your search with a keyword relevant to your niche. So, if I was targeting links for a site I have selling diet pills (I'm really not…) I'd do the following search on Google, for example:
"Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I find It really useful & it helped me out much" "weight loss"
After Penguin, it's important to get your links from relevant sources so it's good practice to find sites that are broadly or directly related to your targeted niche.
You can pretty much automate this entire process with your own bot if you're a programmer, or you could use a tool like Scrapebox as well. However, I prefer to do this form of link building by hand, giving me more control over where I place my links and the anchor text.
Anyway, this is just a very simple trick I thought I'd share and I hope you find it useful. Okay, so you aren't going to get the most authoritative link in the world, but if there's one thing I know, it's that a link is a link and for me that makes this process worthwhile! Feel free to ask any questions
As anyone who owns a website where there is a 'comments' section will probably testify, moderating spammy comments can be a nuisance. However, the 'spam' folder in WordPress can be a potential gold mine of linking opportunities.
What I'll do is go through my spam comments folder in WP and find a random generic crappy comment that has probably been blasted to millions of websites around the web. For example, just this morning I found this little beauty:
"Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I find It really useful & it helped me out much. I hope to give something back and help others like you helped me."
It's a blatant spun comment that's probably been blasted out through some automated SEO tool. So, I'll try and use it to my advantage. I'll copy a section of the comment and paste it in Google – I'll only use a section of the comment because Google limits searches to 32 words. Importantly, I'll wrap the search in double quotes so Google only returns results featuring the exact text I'm searching for.
When I hit the search button, I'll be presented with a list of websites that have approved this comment - they are all potential link sources. For the quote above, Google (UK) returned about 5 million results.
I'll fine-tune my search my using SEO Quake (a free tool everyone should use!) to analyse the SERPs and find sites with a high PR. Chances are there won't be loads, but for my search I found a couple of PR 3-4 sites and a good number of PR 2's. Again, it's easy enough to leave a comment at these sites and get a link.
You can fine-tune your search even further by prefixing (or suffixing…yeah, that's how I roll) your search with a keyword relevant to your niche. So, if I was targeting links for a site I have selling diet pills (I'm really not…) I'd do the following search on Google, for example:
"Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I find It really useful & it helped me out much" "weight loss"
After Penguin, it's important to get your links from relevant sources so it's good practice to find sites that are broadly or directly related to your targeted niche.
You can pretty much automate this entire process with your own bot if you're a programmer, or you could use a tool like Scrapebox as well. However, I prefer to do this form of link building by hand, giving me more control over where I place my links and the anchor text.
Anyway, this is just a very simple trick I thought I'd share and I hope you find it useful. Okay, so you aren't going to get the most authoritative link in the world, but if there's one thing I know, it's that a link is a link and for me that makes this process worthwhile! Feel free to ask any questions
