SEO Tips & Information

As well as building links by posting on dofollow forums, it’s very easy to build links by posting on blogs. Try and make sure that any blog you post on allows dofollow comments - or rather doesn’t put the nofollow attribute on the website URL you put in the comment signature. However, if the blog post has a similar theme to your site and you make a good, interesting comment you might be surprised at how much traffic you get by click-throughs on the comment even if the link is nofollow. Here are a few tips for finding or commenting on dofollow blogs:-

Use a Specialist Search Engine

Use a search engine like www.commenthunt.com or http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/ to find blogs on the same topic as your site or keywords.

Use Google

Search for “list of dofollow blogs” and you’ll soon find blog posts listing loads of URLs for dofollow blogs. The downside of posting comments on these blog URLs is that they’ll soon be spammed to death as other webmasters do the same as you. Your comments have a high chance of being rejected or, in the worst case, the blog owner switches to nofollow.

Hire someone to do the commenting for you

An easy way is hire someone to do the posting for you. On webmaster forums like DigitalPoint, you’ll usually find a lot of offers in the Services thread. Somehow the people offering these services have a knack of finding high PR blog posts - PR 7 is the highest I’ve seen - on which comments seem to be regularly accepted. The downside of using one of these services is that the number of comments per blog post tends to rise rapidly, either because more people use the blog commenting service or because the people who used the service in the first place then make comments for loads of other sites. If you are lucky you’ll find a set of related dofollow blogs allowing you to quite easily find other high PR blog posts that no-one has commented on yet.

Don’t just comment on high PR posts

If a blog has high PR posts that are already spammed with scores of comments, you may find more recent low PR (even PR N/A or PR0) posts on the same blog that don’t yet have comments. It can be worth commenting on these posts. It’s likely the posts have higher PR than the Google toolbar currently shows and on the next PageRank toolbar export, you may find you’ve had a comment on a post that has had a good PR value for a few weeks and you also have had the bonus that there were few other comments on the post to share the link juice with.

For more link-building tips, see link-building using forums, using PAD sites to build links as well as simple link-building tips.

For more tips on finding dofollow blogs, see: http://www.dowebseo.com/general-seo/how-to-find-dofollow-blogs/

Link-building

As I discussed in my simple link-building tips post a while ago, dofollow forums are an easy way of getting links to your site. All you need to do is find a forum, sign up as a member, set up the links in your signature and start posting. Each time you make a post, the post will contain your signature links and the links will pass PR on to your sites.

If you do a search on Google for “list of Dofollow forums” you’ll soon find the URLs of dozens or hundreds of forums you can use to gain links. I’m not going to list hundreds of dofollow forums here, but good examples are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.

There’s no doubt that using forums to build links actually works in terms of raising PageRank and improving performance in SERPs. In the past I’ve got sites to PR 3 using forum links alone. However, as in other aspects of life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you need to bear in mind the following tips when using forums to build links.

The forum homepage should have a high PR

There’s nothing special about forums. Like every other website, the PR passed between pages is shared out. The higher PR of the homepage, the more link-juice is likely to be passed to your sites from the links in your forum posts and signatures. Sites like DigitalPoint and SitePoint have PRs of 6 or 7. Many other forums have far less PR to share out to all the forum posters. Having said that, if you find a small forums with a PR of 2 but few posts you might pick up more link-juice since PR 2/ 1000 posts is more than PR 6 / 100000 posts. This might not be an accurate picture of how the PR situation will work, but hopefully you see the argument.

The forum should have an active community

Lots of members making lots of posts. This has many benefits. If the forum content is regularly updated, Googlebot will visit the forums and index your posts and links more quickly. There will also be more threads on more topics, giving you more opportunity to make posts.

Try to use forums on a similar theme as your sites

For example, DigitalPoint and SitePoint are good for webmasters/ SEO sites since they are webmaster forums. There are loads of other forums around on games, gadgets etc. so pick ones that are suitable for your sites.

Try to use forums on topics you are interested in

Over time this may become the most important tip. Each signature link counts for little on its own. You need to make lots of posts to have a real effect on your sites. If the forum content bores you, posting will become a real drag.

Don’t rely solely on forum-posting for link-building

If you are determined you can build up a few hundred posts in a few weeks or months passing a reasonable amount of PR to your sites. The problem is that your older posts will fall deeper and deeper into the forum pages as new threads are created. Over time the link-juice passed to your forum posts and signature links will fall away. If you use Google Webmasters to keep track of your backlinks, you may find hundreds and hundreds of forum backlinks disappearing. If the links don’t show in Google Webmasters then they don”t count for anything in Google’s eyes.

For more link building tips, see simple link-building tips and link-building using PAD sites.

Link-building

One method of building links to your site is by submitting to PAD-enabled software directories or shareware/ freeware download sites. There are hundreds of these sites around the web. Unlike the usual web directories where you submit a short description of your website together with a link and a nicely worded anchor text, when you submit to a PAD site you are submitting a software package for listing. The details of the software package and its download URL need to be specified in a PAD file.

If you don’t develop software packages, what can you submit to the PAD sites? The temptation is to create and submit is a screensaver. You should easily be able to create a screensaver and PAD file, host them on your site then submit to 600 or so PAD sites and get some links.

Are these links worth it?

The benefits of the kinds of link you get from PAD sites are very variable.

If your site sells software then the links are very worthwhile. Both your site and the PAD site will have a similar topic/ theme and the links will help you in SERPs. The link juice you get from submitting fades away over a few weeks as the links to your site get buried deeper and deeper by newer submissions. You’ll need to top up the link juice by submitting updated versions of your software package every 3 or 4 weeks.

If you don’t sell software, you might find the benefits of the links are marginal at best. You’ll have made a few hundred spammy submissions for no gain. One reason that the links won’t benefit you much is that the PAD site is less likely than other directories to use your company name/ keywords as anchor text in the link back to your site. Most PAD sites simply show your domain’s URL. It could be argued that if you have a keyword rich domain name then you’ll see a greater benefit.

Unless you really do sell software, another reason why you may not see much benefit is that 99% of PAD sites are on the lookout for spammy submissions. Screensavers, toolbars, PDFs and ebooks are automatically red-flagged as spam. These kinds of items are increasingly likely to be rejected. Usually, if you get rejected the PAD site will automatically blacklist the submitting domain and reject any further submissions.

As with all directories, spam is an increasing problem. More and more of the PAD sites are switching to nofollow links and a growing number don’t even provide a nofollow link back to the submitting site.

Sometimes you’ll see SEO companies offering a PAD site submission service. Think before using such a service, as you could well be wasting your money.

For more information, read Link-Building Tips and Choosing Keywords for SEO Purposes.

Link-building