Kenneth Dreyer blog

As some of you may have noticed, I’m not really the most active blogger in the world. I have my reasons. First of all, my marketing company isn’t currently targeting any customers outside of Norway, so I really  don’t have anything to gain from blogging in English. Second, I’m heaps busy with university and work.

Why did I make this blog in the first place then? Well, I do plan to expand into a English speaking country in the near future. Hopefully Australia first, so it’s a good thing to get started as soon as possible.

Anyway, feel free to subscribe to my feed if you would like to get noticed when I start kicking things in the English devision again!

One of the things most SEO’s are afraid to share, are they secret link building techniques. I could understand that you don’t want to give away your most secret tricks for succeeding in the industry, but hey – making good lists is good for link baiting, so I’m still going to give it a go. Here I’ve made a list over some of my best link baiting techniques. Do you have any good techniques not in my list, feel free to share them.

1. Find out who your competitors are. Then do a search for their domain name and a link:competitordomain.com to see where they’ve been linked and talked about. Is there any of these sites you might be able to get your link into?
2. Find blogs, forums and other places in your niche where you can leave your links trough comments. Check if they are nofollowed or not.
3. Go to digg.com and search for keywords related to your niche. See if you can find any good linkbait ideas to submit other places than dig (you would of course want to try digg to, just incase they forgot about the original one).
4. Run a competition. Have bloggers write posts containing links with relevant anchor text to your site. Make it something easy, so as many people as possible will go for it.
5. Donate time/money/product to someone else, in return for a link on their site or a review.
6. Create a blog where you trade reviews with other. Make sure they mention your sites in their reviews.
7. If you like a product, write a review about it. Then email the seller of the product and say that they can use your text as a testimonial.
8. Keep an eye on expiring domains. If someone related to your niche expires, buy them, go to archive.org and find it’s old content, get it up again (on a different host than your main site). If you don’t want to steal the old content, just write of garbage pages and put it up. Make sure to link to your main site.
9. Find out if any of your competitors have any 404 sites being linked to. Notify whoever links them that it’s a 404 link and tell them that there is an replacement on your site.
10. If you’re a university student, try getting a page on the university domain. Tell them you want to make an info page about your studies.
11. Become a DMOZ editor. Start out with a small category no one really cares about and work your way up to the relevant ones.
12. Upload the pictures you use in your site to flickr. Make sure to link to your site (deep links preferred) in the description area on flickr.
13. If you have a old site that you’ve built before you’ve learned about SEO and link building, go through your old pages and archives. Start making some internal links around your site.
14. A good way to get links for blogs is to link to others. People do actually very often link you back.
15. Find places like Yahoo Answers where people ask questions about your industry. Answer them!
16. Some of the big and trusted sites have a page where they list press releases. Find out what press releases they like and write one to put on your site.
17. Be the very first to comment something going on. This works especially great for smaller niches or local sites. Comment things happening in the news and politics and make comments about it on blogs, forums etc. That might make other people making comments about it after you link to your site.
18. They advantage of the holidays. Make something funny out of it. If it’s 1th of April, make a really good April fools. People tend to link to the best April fools jokes on the 2th of April.
19. Be a guest poster. Write for other blogs and magazines.
20. If someone tries to link bait you, go for it. A lot of the link baiters often make posts linking to those who fell for their little tricks.
21. Take advantage of blogs with threaded comments. Always comment the first comments.
22. Try getting into Wikipedia. Yeah, I know its nofollow, but do you have any idea how many people copy and scrape the Wikipedia content around the world?
23. If you’re in a retail business, try asking your provider for some links on their sites.
24. Again, if you’re in the business of selling things online, try sending some free stuff to bloggers for them to review. Require a link.

Some of the more sneaky tricks

1. Find a site you want a link from. Shout them an email about whatever (don’t ask for a link). When you get a reply, snatch their IP address and serve up a special site that only serves to their IP. This is of course a site containing a very good link to their site or maybe even an article. Then ask for a link back.
2. Make a new page and put up a link on your site to someone you would like a link from. Autos generate heaps of traffic going from the link on your site to their site. Then request a link back saying that you’ve already had their link up for a while. When they then check their stats they think they’ve received lots of hits from you and are more likely to link you back. Remember to ask for a link to the main site, not just the site created to scam them.

And most importantly

It doesn’t matter how good you are with building links and traffic to your site, the very best link building strategy will always be building good content to your site.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been studying how Google threats duplicated content on new domains. I’ve been using four different sites in this study, divided into two categories. I’ve been using travel as niche for this study.

Group 1: Unique content, many pages.

In Group 1 both sites had unique content, but many sites with various changes. The first site had only 200+ pages and the other had 2000+ pages. The content on all the pages didn’t vary that much, mostly just keywords in the title, h1 tag and a few places in the main text.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but only the front page. Both sites seem to get new sites indexed in the same speed. Google took one level a time in the hiarchive.

Conclusion: Google does not punish you for having up to thousands of pages with few changes in the content. The sites even ranked well.

Group 2: Copied content

In group to I did two tests where I copied content from the top sites on the keyword I was trying to rank for. One the first site I only had copied content on the front page and on the second I added a few paragraphs of content I had written myself.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but neither one of them showed up in the search results.

Solution and Conclusion: I edited both sites with unique content and it took less than 24 hours before both sites showed up in the rankings. The conclusion is that you cannot copy content from already existing sites.

Conclusion

There have been a lot of talking about what kind of duplicated content will get you punished, but I yet seen anyone put their finger on what kind of duplicate content will get you put in the box by Google. Well, like you can see in my report you won’t get punished for using a script that auto generates thousands of pages with few changes in the content. But you will get punished if you copy content from someone else.

So what did we learn from this? Produce your own content and don’t steal. Simple as that.