Backlink Strategies That Work

August 3, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, SEO

Getting backlinks to your blog or site should be high on the priority list for every blog owner because these backlinks will make a huge difference to the ranking your enjoy (or suffer) in the search engine rankings.

If you thought that leaving comments on other blogs alone would do the trick or if you thought that you had a WordPress blog you could rely upon auto-pinging,.. then please think again!

links If you create an external link to a blog from within your own blog and both blogs are using WordPress then maybe you’ll get a pingback to your blog from the one linked to from your own blog post,.. that is IF the other blog owner has not disabled pinging. The chances of the blog owner having disabled pinging are probably quite high if that blog already enjoys a high profile and gets a lot of traffic and comments, otherwise comment spam (even disguised comment spam or disingenuous comments) would be overly prevalent and become a negative factor to the popular blog owner. The only way to ensure that your backlink will be validated is if you either know or are confident that the blog owner your posting a comment on will approve of you dropping in a link back to your blog. Otherwise you’ll probably be seen as a spammer and your comment writing effort will be worse than wasted,.. it will be canned and maybe your blog or site URL will be blacklisted on that site and then some others also.

If you’re a regular blog commentator and you’d like to confirm what I’m saying is accurate then just Google this search “links:www.yourblog.com” (where “yourblog” is to be replaced by your blog’s name) and you’ll see in an instant how many backlinks you have. Once you’ve checked that and perhaps discovered it to be somewhat dismal or just downright disappointing then you can start working on other backlinking strategies that do work. You’ll probably see some backlinks showing up from comment author links to other WordPress sites and blogs but I’d like to wager that it’s nowhere near the quantity of blogs that you have commented on,.. and the references that you may see for @yourtwittername Twitter comments (if your @yourtwittername is the same as your blog) don’t really count as valid blog backlinks even though they show up in the search and they may have some (albeit very mild) influence in the overall picture.

I’m not saying that you should stop commenting on other blogs entirely or that your efforts and your comment author links are useless or ignored because they may well attract some viewer attenion and you will get some backlinks occurring from some of the blogs that you comment on. However, there’s no assurance of a majority percentage backlink value in them, and for that reason you should perhaps reconsider their relevance and power.

And what about ‘linkbait’ style posts on your blog where you’re inserting links to external blogs in a post that contains one or more links to that blog post owners post or blog or to several different blogs within the one multiple referenced linkbait piece that you’d written? There’s no guarantee that they’ll link back to you or that you’ll get pinged. Perhaps it’s worth running with in the hope that it’ll produce results, and maybe the linkbait post you’re composing is of really decent and relevant value to your blog readers,.. then your blog visitors will probably really appreciate it and it will be great provided that they don’t get so interested in the externally refererenced material that they gravitate away from your site and onto those that you’ve linked instead of staying on yours longer!

I realize that this post gives little in the way of answers or solutions, but the point is that it’s the questions that it raises that will begin to create a positive difference to your strategy of improving your blogs position in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranked Pages) by the implementation of strategies that do work, rather than pouring endless effort into backlinking practices that clearly do not work!

Stay tuned for more articles on this topic soon.

PS. I do have all my posts and articles set to “allow trackbacks” and “allow pingbacks”,… so if you have a WordPress blog,- please comment away and you’ll get a backlink from this blog at least.

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