Category Archives: Link Building

Find Easy Links with Chase the Footprint

  By Chris Dyson |
1 Comment

Finding backlink opportunities by searching for common footprints is a fairly basic tactic when it comes to link building. It’s simply the process of searching for frequently occurring phrases on websites that offer you the opportunity to gain a link if you were to leave a comment, submit a guest post or add your site to their web directory.

One of the main ways I use footprints is to look for websites where I can have a client’s product reviewed, run a giveaway or find a potential opportunity for a link via a guest blog. By simply searching for phrases such as “Submit a Guest Post” in combination with your keywords you can find lots of sites in your vertical that offer guest blogging opportunities.

You can take your link prospecting further by using Boolean Operators and Wildcards in your footprint searches to return more advanced results. For example a search for Apples AND Pears will return results where the words apples and pears both appear on the same web page but not necessarily in the same phrase.

Another way to find guest post opportunities is to follow your competitors footprints a lot of guest bloggers are quite lazy and will use the same author byline again and again. For example John Smith writes on behalf of Big Boy Business this means that all you have to do is type this phrase in to Google in quotations and you’ll find most of their guest blogs. Quite often these sites will have a fairly low submission criteria.

Chase The Footprint is a new tool designed by Dan Bochichio to help link builders find opportunities by searching for common footprints.  Simply input the keyword phrases into the box and then from the drop down menu you can chose to search for Wiki’s, Sponsorship Opportunities, Forums, Blogs and guest blogs.

If you combine Chase the Footprint with the SEOQuake toolbar you can then export the results into a CSV file and then manipulate the results in Excel or Google Docs. Dan also has provided a javascript bookmarklet you can use to export your search results into a spreadsheet too.

The tool is very new and Dan is open to the offer of suggestions for improvements or report any bugs you can contact him via his SEO website. I have already made the suggestion that it would be useful to be able to search different instances of Google such as UK, Australia etc to help link builders cast their nets far and wide. Happy link building!

Improving the Impact of Links in Old Content

  By Chris Dyson |
3 Comments

It’s a well known fact in link building circles that Links in Old content simply aren’t as good as Links in new Content.

Taking some inspiration from a recent Whiteboard Friday I decided to test this theory. Cyrus Shepard, from SEOMoz, went through the theory that a link to your website from some old content does not pass as much “link juice” as a link from a new page; you can see the video below.

What do we mean by an “old page” when we talk about these old pages? From a technical, Google definition point of view, we’re talking about something that has been previously crawled and indexed by Google. Stale content, by stale we mean content that hasn’t been updated in a long time. It was written and it just stayed that way. There are no new blog comments. It has just been for two or three years the same way it was written. And old links. So this old page, all of the links that it got, it got years ago or months ago, and there are no new links coming in. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about an old page. If it doesn’t meet these definitions, then it’s a new page.

Tim Grice, SEOWizz, did a study in March 2011 showing that links on Old Pages just weren’t worth it. Over a 5 week period Tim monitored the changes in search rankings by adding site wide text links in sidebars or footers, links inserted on indexed static pages with a PR 1 or more and finally he inserted links within entirely new content in fresh blog posts.

New Links in Old Content

Source: Links In Old, Crawled Content Don’t Pass Weight

As you can clearly see the rankings for the “old content links” barely changed at all over the period where as the links within the new content rose quickly.

This got me thinking, especially the statement from Cyrus, that in order for Google to consider the page as new again you would need to make a significant change to it or build some links to the old content. But exactly how much of a change would you need to make to a page?

The Experiment

I decided to build links to some of my test sites using the same principles that Tim used, the old pages were already indexed by Google & they had not had any new links built to them recently.

  • Link type 1 was my control this is a link where I only added the link into the text with exact match anchor text.
  • Link type 2 I inserted the link and inserted 1 paragraph within the content
  • Link type 3 I inserted the link and added two paragraphs
  • Link type 4 I inserted the link and did 5 social bookmarks to the old page

old links 1

No surprises that the link only and link plus 1 paragraph saw very little change in rankings but after seeing the great performance of both link type 4 and 3 so early on in the experiment I decided to edit two paragraphs of text and do 5 social bookmarks with another test page.

old links 2

So not only did the page climb the rankings rapidly it has stabilised its new ranking; better than the social bookmarks only pages.

Conclusions

By no means was this a completely controlled and perfect scientific experiment as there was a new Panda update during the period of the test as well as the fact that the the content in the test pages weren’t all exactly the same. But as you can clearly see just by simply adding a link to piece of old content and editing just a small amount of text on an old page it has less value than adding a link, editing some text on the page and building a few links to the old page.

This will flag to the spiders that this page is now relevant and to recrawl the page.Which in turn means that the bots will follow the links within that text once again. In an ideal world it is preferable to build links within new content and shows how important it is to continue with content based link building methods such as using blogger outreach, guest blogging but if you are building links to old content i.e. broken link building it’s worthwhile taking the time to add some more value to the old pages.

How to use Scrapebox for Link Building not Spamming

  By Chris Dyson |
15 Comments

Scrapebox is well known in the SEO community as a Grey Hat, Black Hat, Yellow Polka Dotted Hat link building tool that is mainly used by blog commenting spammers. If you have ever spent any time reading blogs you will have seen the stereotypical comments on blogs. They usually say things such as “Great Blog Post thanks for sharing” with a keyword rich anchor text link to a site selling fake Ugg boots.

I know a lot of my regular readers will have a heart attack at the recommendation of using Scrapebox as a “White Hat” Link Building tool. A lot of people in the SEO community hate the thoughts of automated link building and the sheer mention of a tool such as Scrapebox makes their skin crawl. I can already imagine several people ready to jump down to the comments and tell me that tools like this are ruining the internet…

Well “Soapbox White Hatters” I’m going to show you a way that you can actually use Scrapebox to make the internet a better place… in fact a safer place for all!

So what is this Scrapebox Link building technique?

This link building technique utilises some of the free plugins that you can get from Scrapebox, the main tactic in this technique is to find a compromised or malware infected site and open a dialogue with the site owner in an attempt to receive a link either via a Guest Post or by suggesting the site owner replaces broken links with your own.

Scrapebox currently costs $97 (there are a few coupons on the net for $57 if you search around) and for the amount of time and money this tool will save you it is more than worth the investment. Scrapebox allows you to harvest thousands of URL’s from Google and Bing in no time at all and by entering your own custom footprints e.g. “submit * guest post” [keyword] you will find lots of guest blogging opportunities for your niche quickly. You can also import .txt files with lots of different search terms to put your harvesting on steroids.

The first free plugin you will need is the Malware and Phishing Filter once you have installed this plugin it allows you to search a list of sites from Scrapebox to find sites that have been compromised by some form of Malware. If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup on your websites then Google will normally inform you that a site has been infected by malware. Sadly many bloggers and small business owners rarely check their sites for malware and not everyone knows how to setup Google Webmaster tools.

Import your list of scraped URLs into the Malware checker and run it. This will flag up any site that has been compromised by some form of malware. You now want to export all of these bad urls and using the OSE check for PA/DA of the pages. Starting with the sites with the highest authority I then work down my list.

You can run the list through the Scrapebox Whois tool or use Scrapebox itself to check the contact page for any email addresses. You do not want to visit these sites as there is a risk that your computer maybe infected by a virus.

Now you want to send an email to the webmaster informing them of the malware issue on their site and send them a link to some helpful blog posts on how to fix malware infected sites. (If you haven’t checked out John Doherty’s blog post on SEOMoz about outreach email then make sure you do!)

You obviously do not want to ask for a link at this point. Depending on the quality of the site it might be worth using your hustle to track down alternative contact details too such as phone number, Twitter Handle, LinkedIn profile etc.

I have had a very good success rate in contacting webmasters using this technique and quite often I find that they are very grateful for you pointing out the problem on their website. Now that you have the dialogue with the site owner I will leave it to your imagination as to what approach you use next to obtain the link. But, this a good time to check the site for broken links or pitch a guest blog as the webmaster will probably have to recover the content on the site. I have even had a few webmasters offer me the chance to buy their sites for a small fee as they don’t have the time or inclination to fix their site and keep it up to date anymore!

So there you have it one way in which you can use a well regarded spam tool to speed up your link building research and to help make the web a safer place.

If you have any more Scrapebox tips and tricks drop them in the comments below.

My Comprehensive Guide to Guest Blogging

  By Chris Dyson |
6 Comments

I often receive emails and tweets from my followers on Twitter who ask me what is the best way to get backlinks to their sites. All too often I see people recommending blackhat or ineffective link building techniques that will often see little return on the time or money invested by the individual concerned. So this brings us to guest blogging or guest posting, it is a great form of link building because it’s organic, it also gives exposure to you and your brand. I can’t recommend guest blogging as a scalable and long lasting link building technique enough.

So in order to help people find out more about Guest blogging I have taken the time to write this guide to guest blogging so that hopefully I can quell a few myths and help make the internet a better place with fewer spammy articles and more quality content.

So what is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging is the process of you writing for another website as a guest author – it is that simple.

It is very important to know that guest blogging isn’t only for promoting a blog but it can also be used to promote your website and business. You can get a professional copy writer to help write the content for you but to be honest it’s much better to write the article yourself so that you can put across a bit of your personality and possibly explain your industry knowledge a little better.

Why Should I Guest Blog?

Quite simply I always answer with the same 4 things to businesses. Business owners want to see figures attributed to any investment so I always quote the following which can be measured quantitatively:

  • Web Traffic – Let’s be honest the most important factor in running a website is traffic. You can be top of the SERP’s for lots of keywords but if those keywords aren’t bringing people to your site then what’s the point in them! Guest blogging allows you to get in front of a new audience and often on very busy websites and some of these people will read your article and come to your blog/site to learn more about you.
  • More Customers – It is very important that once you get a person on to your website you convert them into a customer or a prospect whether that means they buy your product/service, join your mailing list or simply just subscribe to your RSS feed.
  • High Quality Links – If you want your blog or website to get good rankings in the search engine results pages, then you need backlinks. Guest blogging is one of the simplest and most legitimate ways to get your keyword rich anchor text links to your website from high authority sites. I am yet to come across a simpler and more effective white hat method for getting good rankings.
  • Exposure – As any business owner knows it is all about getting your business or brand name out in to the world. Building a good reputation in your field will help you achieve so much more. Opportunities may well arise for you to speak at business conferences to share your knowledge with other people in your community.

Guest Blogging offers a real win-win-win opportunity for all involved – the reader gets some great content from a new perspective, the blogger gets a day off as well as some content to enrich their own work and you get access to an audience as well as a good quality link.

The benefits of Guest Blogging vs. Article Marketing

One thing I have noticed is that many people compare guest blogging to article marketing, this is such a great misconception. I have yet to see an article directory that has sent over 1,000 visitors to a website in 24 hours.

Many article directories have been downgraded following the Google Panda update and with good reason too as many had become a haven for dodgy SEO practitioners who spun content until it was unreadable. Article directories are not designed for people and offer very little SEO value.

Guest Blogging Strategies

Guest blogging has principles and one of the principles of guest blogging is that you must set goals before getting started. Don’t burn yourself out writing lots of articles for too many sites, so make sure you stick to your goals to get the most “bang for your buck”. This is why you need to also think more strategically.

I see guest blogging opportunities as 2 key tiers:

  1. Contributing to high-quality; high-authority sites
  2. Contributing to good quality, less authoritative niche sites

If a guest bloging opportunity does not fit in to the top 2 types then I don’t bother with it, after all we are looking for decent links that will provide our sites with traffic and good rankings. I don’t write articles for lower quality sites simply because a) they are more likely to disappear and b) blog posts become more and more hidden over time so if the blog I am contributing to does eventually hit the big time my article will be under layers and layers of pages and have very little link juice.

Write your post first – I always recommend writing the article first before pitching your ideas to the blog owner. There is nothing worse than pitching an idea, agreeing a deadline and then struggling to hit it.

Respond to Comments – Because guest blogging is about writing on relevant websites, it’s important to stay professional and friendly with the influencers in your niche that you interact with. Not only should you try to keep in email contact with the blogger you’re writing for, but respond to as many comments as you can once your guest post goes live. This will show the blogger (and their site readers) that you genuinely want to give people genuine advice on whatever it is you write about.

Don’t forget about your blog! – After all let’s not forget that once you have had lots of new visitors to your website you need to keep them coming back. So make sure that you write some great articles in advance of any guest blogging campaign so that any new RSS / email subscribers will stick with you.

How To Find Guest Blog Opportunities

There are lots of great ways to find guest blogging opportunities and I recommend that you start out by reaching out to your business contacts, friends and social networks to see if they would be prepared to let you write an article on their site. But as I said above it is important to find websites with lots of traffic and good authority so I recommend the below techniques too:

Google Search – Here are some Google search tips that will let you find valuable guest posting opportunities in your niche.

Firstly do a search online for Guest blogging opportunities. Here’s more or less complete list of phrases bloggers use to invite people to guest post:

  • “Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
  • “Add blog post”
  • “Submit an article”
  • “Suggest a guest post”
  • “Send a guest post”
  • “Write for us”;
  • “Become an author”;
  • “Guest bloggers wanted”
  • “Contribute to our site”;
  • “Become a contributor”;
  • “Become guest writer”
  • “(Write for our) guest column”.

Now, you may have noticed that all the phases are used in the quotation marks – this is to force Google to search for the exact match because otherwise you will get too general results randomly mentioning “post”, “contribute” and “guest”.

For example type into Google:  “Submit an article” credit cards

Now if you are a little more Google search savvy you can try some more advanced search strings.

More often than not it is hard to describe your blog topic with just one keyword. For example, your blog may be about money, credit cards, loans, finance etc. The more words you use, the lesser results you will get, because Google will do its best to show you only those pages that have all of those words listed.

To get broader but relevant results, we should instruct Google to search for any of the words – for that we can use OR operator between the words: “money OR loans OR finance OR credit cards” because, essentially we are interested in guest blogging on sites covering any of these topics.

To go even further in this direction, we can use ~ operator before a word that may have many synonyms and related words and thus instruct Google to look for all those synonyms. For example, “~money” search will include words like “currency”, “finance”, “financial”, etc. Also there is the wild card operator “*” as many bloggers may use a phrase differently e.g  “submit a guest post”, “submit your guest post”, “submit us a guest post”.

So if we were to combine all the above tips you would get

“submit * guest post” ~Money OR Credit Cards OR Loans

Guest Blogging Community –  There are various blogging communities out there. MyBlogGuest is my personal favourite guest blogging community as it has a wide variety of niche blogging opportunities and a very healthy number of members. Simply visit their forum and post that you are looking for guest blogging opportunities in your niche.

Technorati  – A great way to find the top blogs in your niche is by making use of the technorati blog directory. Even though this isn’t a great way to find smaller blogs, it is one of the most effective ways to discover the big blogs in your niche should you decide to start guest blogging on big blogs.

Guest blogging is a numbers game so always aim to write good quality blog posts on 10 great blogs rather than on 50 lower authority blogs.

Approaching Blog Owners

Once you have found the blog you want to write for there are some basic steps you have to take to make sure your request is noticed:

  1. Read the Guidelines: it may sound obvious but big blog owners are busy people so make sure you follow their submission requirements.
  2. Get to know them: read their previous articles and guest articles, comment on the website and join in the conversation, follow them on Twitter – play to their ego
  3. Make it easy for them: most of the time I send an email with the blog post in a .txt notepad file with my copyright free images attached. I use a .txt file so that the html stays intact and my links are exactly how I want them.

Writing Great Guest Blog Posts

After all the work you have put in so far you want to make sure that your guest blog is accepted and published on the site you are targeting. So I guess the following tips will help you to make sure you write a great post:

Research -  use as many tools as you can to write a great article. Use Google Insights, Blog Comments, popular blog posts on other websites, Yahoo Answers etc. to research your topic. Try to find out what questions people are asking. I always find it is better to write an article that people want rather than just to throw up an article that “I think” they want!

Headline – make sure your headline is catchy and clearly describes your article. Remember you want people to read your guest post so be sure to spend some time thinking of great ideas.

Write your best content – This goes without saying, take your time and put some effort in to making the blog post look great and read well. Stay on topic and don’t waffle.

Images and sub headers – Split up your article with headings and images

Word Count – not too short and not too long… I have found that most people want to read a guest post around 600-1200 words.

Proofread – I can’t stress this enough; make sure you take the time to read and re-read your guest blog post for silly spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. At the end of the day you don’t want your work to be rejected after you’ve spent hours researching, writing and flirting befriending the blog owner.

What to Do If You Get Rejected

You have to accept now that you will get rejected. But don’t feel bad, move on some bloggers may give you a reason others may not. The main thing to do is keep trying and learning. I would urge that you don’t keep pestering the blogger if you are rejected and take any feedback they give you on board.

Go and Take Action

Now that you have read this article I want you to identify some key blogs in your business area and write some great guest blogs for your website. I hope this guide has been useful and please leave some comments below to share your thoughts and experiences of guest blogging.

I would also be grateful if you could share this article with your friends too :)

+Chris Dyson