11 Nasty Link Building Tricks!

After the last article on the best techniques for link building, my wild thought process took me far deeper into the jungle. Here, I have some nasty techniques you may want to use to get real nice backlinks into your websites.

1. Free Traffic Banner Giveaway

Trick applies when you have a popular blog, which is high PR as well as high traffic. In that case, just advertise on your site that you are giving some free promotion to fellow bloggers out there. Tell them that you will place their banner on your site for a week in exchange for a permanent link on their site. The traffic is your offering. Place a nicely designed great banner from the other blogger on a prominent position on your site, and promote it for a few days, may be a week.

This trick may get the blogger some feed subscribers or permanent visitors, if his blog is really useful. In exchange for this service, there is nothing wrong in asking a backlink; who knows that backlink won't be a PR5 two years later!

2. Promotion Offer Within Your Social Network

If you check out my social network profile in BlogCatalog, you will know that it’s one of the largest profiles out there. I have above 2000 friends, and am building on and on. I could even get some links from the best of the blogs out there. I also have nearly a thousand broadcast viewers and hundreds of members in two of the useful groups there. The point is to build a really huge social networking profile. You have to work hard on this, and add friends.

Offer one of your friends with a high PR site free promotion and link building from these communities. They are sure to get some links at your expense. In exchange, ask a permanent link from their site.

Now, you may ask me why I can’t promote my own site this way. I will tell you. This trick is really for those blogs that need internal linking. In fact, when you place a request for link in these communities, you will most likely get offers from low PR sites.

Tell a high PR high traffic blogger who wants some low PR links (low PR is also important for SEO) to his internal post pages that you can advertise their posts on your community page in exchange for link from their blogs to your blog. This way, you will get a high PR link and the person several low PR links.

3. Article Marketing for Your Friends

This is not quite a nasty trick. Let’s assume that you have an article submitter application. We do. Tell a fellow blogger with high PR that you can place their article in hundreds of directories free. In exchange, ask some links from their top post pages.

This way, you can build links for them in hundreds and in exchange get a really good high PR link from their site. The value of a high PR link is equal to hundreds of links in article directories.

The same plan applies to press release websites.

4. Social Media Voting for Links

Offer a fellow blogger that you can fave them on Technorati, Digg their articles, vote them on Mixx, etc., in exchange for a high PR link. Not for a PR0 link, okay? That is valueless. We want priceless PR3 or above links this way.

5. Run Their Advertisements

If you have high traffic site, why not run the affiliate links and Clickbank product commission links of a low traffic blogger for a few days in exchange for valuable links to your blog? Negotiate, negotiate! The links you will get will eventually position you in higher search rankings. There is nothing to lose.

6. You Have a Blog About Google?

If you have a blog about anything hot, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc., then design it like them. For instance, all Google blogs are placed on Blogspot platform, and have a general unappealing design. If you design exactly like that and name it something like “googleblogger.blogspot.com”, “googletech.blogspot.com”, googleadsystem.blogspot.com” etc. (I am not sure if such blogs are there or not; I haven’t checked), then many of your readers may believe that it’s an official Google blog and subscribe. However, don't forget to mark unobtrusively somewhere that it's unofficial.

This is the technique used by Google System, an unofficial Google blog. This guy ranks higher than Problogger or any other professional blogger. Also, he has almost 70k subscribers. So, it really pays off. Twitter is a great candidate for this now, as it seems all Google slots are already filled!

7. Get Free High PR Sneak Link

Want a link from a really high PR site like a PR6 site for instance? Then listen! You have to act as an intermediary here. You have a great social media presence, right? Find out two bloggers, one PR7 and the other PR6, who are looking for link exchange. You can also have two bloggers, who have both the same PR but differing Alexa ranks.

Now go to the first one, make him your friend, and enquire if he wishes to have a PR 7 blog link exchange. He will certainly agree to it. Go to the PR 7 blogger and enquire if he wants a link exchange with a PR6 blog. A link, though from one step lower blog, is highly appealing to everybody. Also, a PR6 blog is not too worthless. It’s equal to thousands of PR3 blog links. So the PR7 blogger will agree most probably. Otherwise, just search around for other PR7s.

Now, as both sides are agreed, tell the PR6 blogger that in order for the high PR link, he has to place two links. And the second link—obviously to your site. Vodka for the mediator!

The same applies for the Alexa-rank-differing blogs. Tell the lower Alexa person that the link is from higher traffic blog and hence requires two link backs. A link back from even an inner page of a high PR site is highly valuable. It will save you time from building thousands of PR3 links.

But, of course, make sure that the bloggers don’t already know each other. Champagne for those who can mediate interlinking of three or four blogs and sneak two or three high PR links!

8. Make a Big Buzz Through Social Media

People love writing about news. So, make news out of even the simplest and smallest things out there. Be an authority provider of news in your area. Maybe some small search engine startup is struggling in your area. Tell the world through your blog that it’s gonna be the next Google! People will forget the fact that you are the only person telling about it and will make their own buzz posts about the startup with links to your article telling others that you are the authority on this.

If you are really creative, you can make news out of anything. If you are the first to discover it, you are the authority. Even if you are not the first to blog about it, make it look like only you discovered it. People love to link to authorities.

For instance, remember Google Dance? It’s a technique Google uses to prevent more than a fixed number of visits to your site. In fact, a blog has a potential to get thousands of visitors daily. But you see only a few hundred because of this little Google frenzy. This is quite known in the SEO, but there are a number of people who don’t really know about it. What if you make a post titled “Google’s New Technique: Search Results Fluctuation” and announce this to your readers? Your readers may think you discovered something new and will link to you.

I don’t recommend writing about already known facts. Keep yourself agile about anything that crops up and make a buzz of it.

9. Elevate Your Statistics

Let’s assume with your hard work you got a ‘.edu’ link from a highly reputed educational website. The importance of such links needn’t be explained to the SEO community. Now, tell your readers that you are recognized as an authority in whatever field you blog on.

In fact getting an Edu link is not any indication of your worth, but you can inflate its importance. Even if you got a respectable PR6 link from any normal domain, learn the art of inflation. Just as the tip above, make it a news that you are recognized as an authority by a respectable institution. It quadruples your authority status, and as I said, people love to quote and link to authorities.

To get an edu link, you can apply to be in the alumni association of your university or college (as Lenin Nair himself did) or befriend and network with educational webmasters and be quite useful to them.

At the time of PageRank update, quite a few bloggers list some sites that increase or decrease in PR. You can check with them to be part of this list even if you didn't have any PR change (you still remain at zero, but tell them that you were six). You will get a free link in this way, if your PageRank considerably increased. CuteWriting’s article on PageRank update actually fetched some links.

10. Offer to Review Products for Free

Any new struggling company with new products in the market? Your PR is really good enough? Approach the company telling that you can review their product for free. Most would agree. All you ask is a link back to the review page.

The advantage of this is twofold. First, companies are always capable of rising high in trust and PageRank, and your link will become quite valuable in some months. Second, companies displaying your link or logo is a direct credit of your authority and reach as a professional reviewer. This will fetch some additional links.

11. Bonus Tip! Sneak Link

If you read my last article on link building, you will know there was a tip on promoting WordPress and Blogger templates for links and keeping a link at the bottom. Some bloggers that use your template are nastier than you, and may remove this link altogether. To fight them, make a sneak extra link within the template somewhere. Put a period (.) as the link text or a character like this ‘:)’. This way, even though anchor text targeting won’t be available, you will have a backlink.

Make this link anywhere other than the footer, because most nasty bloggers look at the footer for the creator links to delete them. In fact, you can even put the link within a useful widget such as the blog Google translation widget, you supply with your template. The advantage is that Widget links normally don’t show up in the template at all, and the blogger may not notice it.

Importance of Links Video

I fetched a video post from YouTube telling you the importance of backlinks. It will be a good enough introductory.




Conclusion

Nasty tricks, huh? Link building should be done very carefully and methodically. Also, it shouldn’t be overdone. Make it very natural.

In order to get my truckloadfuls of White Hat nastier and nastier techniques, keep subscribed to the blog. I will divulge the nastiest tricks when I will be a pro blogger myself! Very nasty, huh?

Image Credit: Dragonflyfreelance.com
 
Copyright © Gayatri Jayashankar 2008