Increasing Inbound Links: Part 1
May 10, 2007 | Comments (11) | Filed under: Traffic
In last months statistics summary, I mentioned that one of my goals for the month of May was to increase the number of inbound links pointing to my primary domain. In the recent Google Pagerank update, I was a little disappointed by the fact Bookmark Bliss climbed only from a PR 2 to a PR 3. I know that pagerank really doesn’t impact a site that heavily, but it’s still a measure of how many incoming links you have on other sites and to me it feels way too low. Some of the pages here have ranked really well in their own right. Specifically ones that were liked at the social news sites, such as 10 lessons frank miller’s 300 can teach you about successful online business, which has a page rank of 5.
Since this site is very new, these high ranking individual pages don’t actually have any affect on our primary URL (www.bookmarkbliss.com). At the time the pagerank was calculated, they all had a rank of zero, which doesn’t improve our main URL at all. In the next update, which should be in late July or August, our page rank should be much higher simply because we are linked to from these PR5 pages internally. It’s sort of a bubble up effect.
Instead of simply waiting for the pagerank to increase automatically, I also decided to be more proactive in securing linkbacks from high ranking sites. I recently read an interesting post over in the digital point forums entitled how I received +30,000 visitors in one short month. While the author claims a lot of things, that are most likely exaggerated to convince people to pay for his services, he does list a nice progression of sites that if you’re linked from, will definitely improve your pagerank.
For example, in the 1st class social bookmark list, the author suggests building links to your site from high ranking, high traffic sites such as Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Technorati, and Listable. In the 2nd class set, you pretty much find all the other usual suspects such as Reddit, Newsvine, Squidoo, and PopURLs.
The list he provides is great and it’s similar to hundreds of others you can find with slight variation on many different sites. WebBlogHits, for example, has another list highlighting 55 social bookmarking sites to promote your blog. The take home of these type of lists is that it’s better for your site, from a pagerank standpoint, to be linked from 1 high ranking site, then it is to be ranked from many low ranking sites.
So, my first step in increasing my pagerank and more importantly, the number of sites linking to my primary URL, will be to build my own list of sites to target for linkback. Some of these sites are easy to get a linkback from, such as Slashdot or Digg, while others are much more difficult. My goal is to create a nice set of links that can quickly and easily be used to build a solid link base for any site, including this one.
As soon as I’ve had a chance to compile my list, I’ll post it here for others to use and for advice on other sites to add. For anyone of you who have taken similar steps to increase your inbound links, what are some of the sites you’ve had the most success with that others may not think about?
Hopefully, by the end of this month I’ve had a chance to score us a lot of good inbound links and be well on my way to meeting our monthly goal.
feel free to leave a comment
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11 people have left comments
That’s a nice suggestion to improve a website popularity, probably I’ll try submitting my site to some social bookmarking sites. I just changed the domain name and need more incoming links to my new URL.
Linking is getting harder and harder. Sites covet PR and do not want to let it leek away. You are right, social bookmarking is hot.
Here is the ultimate list of over 200 social bookmarking sites, http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html
If your are interested, I used to have a tool that would submit to 20 at a time. But even doing that, you are still going to get beat by black-hatters that have 200 tools doing 200 sites at once.
stark -
Your information is valuable. Your writing is almost as bad as mine. I suggest: The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
Strunk never authored a web site, if he did would read this and follow it’s rules: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
Come on now, you knowz I writes Gud!
Seriously though, if you visited this site frequently, you would know that I constantly mention my lack of official writing training. In my personal opinion, information is information and if a writer has good content but doesn’t necessarily present it like an english scholar, that’s ok with me. I read dozens of blogs every day that are very popular even though the author is not the greatest writer. It’s all about content and I’ll work on improving my writing skills as I go along…
Sometime ago I came across a list of all the social bookmarking sites that do not have nofollowed links, I will see if I can find it and post the link here.
I always have a hard time grasping the no nofollow linking. The double negative always gets me
Nice strategies though!
You have listed great sites here to increase traffic. I just started blogging a few months ago – this is great stuff. Thanks!
Good stuff. Looking forward to part II.
I will definitely be looking forward to hearing more about your progress on this matter. It’s hard for newcomers (such as myself) to make an impact and get links. Anything you teach us will be useful.
Thanks for the hints/suggestions. I’m slowly building my rank (focusing on Technorati right now), so hopefully your ideas will help.