Mar
You may or may not remember that I posted one of my methods for getting backlinks (and I have 2 PR3 sites that prove this works!) using forums. The idea was to create a transparent 1×1 pixel gif, and use BBcode to wrap it in [URL][/URL] tags, giving you something that looks like this
[URL=http://www.ericmitz.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]
Some might consider this spam, or blackhat, but I don’t think anyone really gets harmed. The people in forums certainly don’t notice it (sometimes I can’t even find the damn pixel). More recently I have even used this multiple times in a single post to get backlinks to multiple sites at once.
[URL=http://www.ericmitz.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL][URL=http://www.digmyhonda.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL][URL=http://www.project-cars-for-sale.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL][URL=http://www.online-dating-blogger.com]
[img]http://www.ericmitz.com/blank.gif[/img]
[/URL]
The biggest problem with this method, as you might have guessed if you do any kind of SEO work, is that you cannot specify anchor text because you can’t add an “alt” tage to the image. Even so, this has worked well for me.
I have recently come accross another way to use forums for backlinks, and this one is even less intrusive, and gives you the ability to set your own anchor text. Here is the basic overview:
1. Find any forum without “nofollow” (preferably with PR4+)
2. Register as a new user
3. Fill out your profile details, and be sure to add your “homepage url” (just a bonus)
4. Create a signature with a keyword rich link to your affiliate site
5. View your member profile page and grab the URL. Your Signature will probably be displayed on this page.
6. Head on over to PingOMatic and ping your profile URL.
7. DO NOT POST! You can if you want, but many forums don’t allow commercial links in your sig. So just work off your profile page, and no one will ever know.
If that sounds confusing, I’ll take you through the process:
1. Find any forum without “nofollow” (preferably with PR4+)
Hmmm…Lets see. I wen’t on over to www.big-boards.com to see what some of the biggest forums on the internet are. Looking through the list, I noticed www.vwvortex.com, and since its run by the same people as www.honda-tech.com ,I know that it doesn’t use “nofollow”, and after a quick PageRank Check, I see that its a PR5. This looks like a good candidate.
2. Register as a New User
Well, If you can’t do this on your own, you’re probably in the wrong business. You might want to call up McDonalds.
3. Fill out your profile details, and be sure to add your “homepage url” (just a bonus)
Click on the link to change your profile
Enter your Home page URL (most forums have this). And click Save.
Again, You don’t have to do this part, its just 1 more link.
4. Create a signature with a keyword rich link to your affiliate site
Find the page that lets you edit your forum signature:
Enter a few URLs. They can be deep links if you want!
5. View your member profile page and grab the URL. Your Signature will probably be displayed on this page
Find the page which allows you to view your user profile:
Admire your page with links, and grab the URL:
6. Head on over to PingOMatic and ping your profile URL.
This will tell the search engines that your profile page exists. It will eventually find the page over time because most forums have a “member list”, but this will speed up the process.
7. DO NOT POST! You can if you want, but many forums don’t allow commercial links in your sig. So just work off your profile page, and no one will ever know.
Well, I don’t have a screenshot for this, but uh…just don’t post if you think it will get you banned…k?
You can multiply this method by using different forums, and/or creating new usernames. But its fairly simple to do, and can get you some pretty high PR back links without worrying about being a spammer. Now, obviously different forum software is going to be a little different, but most of the common forum platforms like Vbulletin, Invision, and phpbb all have the same kind of features.
16 Responses so far to "Using Forums For Backlinks…Again"
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Hey Eric,
Della here. Just spent some time reading through your blog. Great stuff! I love this idea you have for builidng backlinks without posting. Very cool.
My challenge is that my time is limited b/c I am spread too thin between kids, work, business, etc…so this is an EXCELLENT tactic!
OK, so here are my questions:
1. How do you know if a forum has a no follow? (I don’t even know what a no follow is…)
2. “Enter a few URLs. They can be deep links if you want!” Which urls…like diff articles that I have on my site, or diff sites that I have? And what does a deep link mean. (I am guessing it means diff pages on my blog/site?)
Sorry if these are dumb questions. But I LOVE the do not post part! (:
Thanks for the great post!
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Hey Della,
1. nofollow is something that webmasters can put in their link code to tell Google NOT to count that link in the PageRank algorithm. To figure out if a site uses no follow, you’re unfortunately going to have to look at the HTML source code. Within the source code, you will see something like
< a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow" >Example< / a >
if you see that “rel=’nofollow’” in there, its a bad thing. don’t even bother with the forum. If its not there, you are clear. MOST forums do not use nofollow, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
2. A deep link is one that points to a specific page on your site, rather than just the homepage. When I said “enter a few URLS”, I meant that you can add any URLS you want, whether they are from the same site or different sites. It just takes a little bit of work out to kill a few sites at a time.
-Eric
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Thanks for the fast reply and the explanations, Eric. I’m off to hunt for forums!
Cheers!
March 4th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Hey Eric,
Ok, I am back to report how it went. I went to three forums that I found on the site your recommended. I registered at all 3 and out of the 3 only 2 allowed me to have a sig. One of them wanted me to post 50 times b4 I could have a sig line..so that forum is out.
I then went to Ping-o-matic and pinged them, and in both cases, I got this error:
“Slow down cowboy!
You’re pinging us too fast.
Your last ping was less than a few minutes ago
Please only ping us when you update.
If you don’t think you pinged us
Maybe some software automatically did. (Like WordPress.) The good news is we already sent out a ping for you.”
Now, I will say that I didn’t check if they had a no follow rule…mainly b/c I am not good at reading code, and wasn’t sure where to find it. So I figured I would just give it a shot and if it had a no follow, I would just move on tho the next.
Do you think this is why it wouldn’t ping it?
March 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Yeah, I guess thats one of the things you need to worry about. I’ve run into a few forums that don’t allow sigs. You just have to move on (its really no different than submiting to a directory and not getting accepted).
As far as pinging, many newer sites will automatically make a ping when the page is created, thats probably what is happening. Either way, the site got pinged, so you’re fine.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
So do you go back and ping it regularly? Or do you just do it once in the beginning?
March 5th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Good stuff Eric. I’m currently working SEO on a few sites and I’m going to try these tips out. Seems to make perfect sense, glad I found them!
March 6th, 2008 at 8:22 am
But profile pages are going to basically worthless for the back link, aren’t they?
I know ‘the more links the better’ - but wouldn’t it be much more worth your time, say, finding blogs which don’t have no-follow on and just posting a comment? Good idea with the pixel link.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Andrew, Why would you think a profile page is any different than any other page?
I sometimes use blogs for links as well, I was just putting “yet another” link building solution out there.
Once you get the hang of it, you can bang out a bunch of them really quick. I did about 10 last night in around 15 minutes.
I have found it to be much faster than submiting to directories, and you’re almost guarenteed the link.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:35 am
HINT: check out the firefox extension called “iMacros”. I have used this for other things on the web, and I am currently addapting it to work for link building.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Hey hey… also, once you have like 10-20 forums, many times, you can fit 3-5 sites in your signature, so when building links for a new site, you can go back to your old forum profiles, and include yet another link to another site without hurting your other one(s).
March 11th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
your pr is o
March 11th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
my PR is 0 because I have never once done any link building for this blog.
my PR for www.hondoogle.com and www.digmyhonda.com are both 3.
and I used the transparent gif method almost exclusively to do it.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Hi Eric,
Great blog! Very useful. I’d love to hear about the uses that you’ve found for iMacros. I’ve been using it for automating some of my keyword research.
A series of posts on different uses for iMacros would be cool. (hint hint)
April 25th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Eric,
whats goin on with teh blog?
Also — I’ve been finding a lot of infusion forums have no follow links… vbulletin better?
May 13th, 2008 at 2:44 am
I like the 1×1 pixel idea. but the problem is if someone quotes your post, you can be exposed. EEEKK!