Wondering how to get free traffic?
Building a website or blog is super easy.
Getting traffic especially free traffic from search engines is super difficult.
Majority of the small businesses require free traffic to survive simply because they can’t afford to pay thousands of $$$ to buy traffic.
Getting your website rank high in the search engines ensures your business success and high PR backlinks play a crucial part in this process.
This is why I requested blogging Queen and freelance writer Kristi Hines to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about building backlinks.
There is plenty of information out there, which makes things really difficult to find to the point, and authentic information.
I am so thankful to Kristi for taking time to answer the following questions with so much authority yet keeping it really easy to understand that any newbie can implement straight away.
I hope this will help plenty of people out there who are suffering from a bad SEO advice.
Don’t forget to ask any question you may have about this topic in the comments section below.
Enjoy the Q & A.
Rana Q1: How important is to build high pr backlinks to your blog or website for the success of your online business?
Kristi: Backlinks are very important to any website’s success. It’s important to think of building links not only for SEO value, but for direct clicks as well. Hence, don’t just put your links on sites that are dofollow, high PageRank, but see minimal traffic.
And don’t miss out on getting your link on a site that has a ton of traffic just because it is not dofollow. The point of link building is to improve your rankings in search so people will click on your link. But if you can get links people will click on, then the same goal has been accomplished – the goal of getting more visitors to your site.
Rana Q2: What are your thoughts on effectiveness of building backlinks using blog commenting technique and important points to know when building links through this technique?
Kristi: There are two ways to do blog commenting. There is the SEO way, which is looking for blog posts with high PageRank that are also dofollow. Usually any blog post that has PageRank will be a bit old – a few weeks, a few months, or maybe even a few years. So comments on these posts will almost be purely for SEO value only. Mind you that Google is constantly updating their algorithm, and already warn against comment spam.
The other way is the building authority / traffic way. This involves commenting on blogs with a good volume of traffic and overall strong domain authority / PageRank, but not necessarily concentrating on pages with high PageRank or worrying about the dofollow factor.
What you get by doing this is the recognition and the clicks on your link from the comments themselves. Usually the key is to always leave valuable comments, reply directly to other comments (especially on systems like Livefyre and Disqus where the other user will be notified about your reply), and try to comment as soon as the post goes live so more people will see your comment (assuming the comments are in chronological order and not newest comment first).
Rana Q3: What is the best and quick way to find out do follow blogs to comment and how do you determine the PR of the specific page.
Kristi: Some good places to start are dofollow directories and posts like the following.
- http://dofollow.info
- http://followlist.com
- http://smartboydesigns.com/2011/02/11/54-dofollow-blogs-list
- http://www.youngprepro.com/list-51-dofollow-blogs-comment
- http://www.geeks4share.com/2011/06/list-of-60-high-pr-do-follow-blogs-that-use-commentluv
As far as determining page PR, I use SEO Site Tools for Chrome. For Firefox, you can use SEOquake, but be sure to check the settings to only give you information on request.
Rana Q4. Will you always get a PR5 back link by commenting on any page of PR5 blog?
Kristi: One thing to keep in mind about commenting on high PR pages is that you aren’t necessarily getting the full “link juice” – especially if there are a lot of other comments on the page. A page with 5 outgoing links means that the link value is split between all 5 links making it more valuable, vs. a page with 25 outgoing links where the link value of the page is split between all 25.
Rana Q5: Should you create a list of blogs to comment and keep building links or always keep exploring new blogs and websites?
Kristi: Supposedly, Google values links from lots of different domains more so than links from the same domain. So a site with 100 backlinks from a total of 10 domains wouldn’t look as good as a site with 100 backlinks from a total of 90 domains (unless the site with 10 domains were high authority). But again, it depends on whether you’re commenting for SEO or for authority. For authority (which is a better goal), you should subscribe to those blogs and comment on them regularly.
Rana Q6: There are plenty of ways to build backlinks, is there any issue if you are just concentrating on one way of building links such as blog commenting.
Kristi: You want your link profile to look as natural as possible. This means having links of all types – dofollow, Nofollow, blog comments, social profiles, social bookmarks, in-content, guest posting, quality directories, etc.
Rana Q7: What is the importance of using anchor texts when building back links?
Kristi: If you think of a link as a the equivalent of a “vote” towards your website, then the anchor text is what someone is voting for on your website. So for my freelance writing portfolio, I would prefer people to use the keywords freelance writer as the anchor text.
This should hopefully boost my rankings in search so more people searching for the phrase freelance writer will find me.
That said, you shouldn’t always build links with the same anchor text. This goes back to the “looking natural” part. If Google notices the same site always is linked to as womens clothing, it might tip them off that the site is out getting links to rank for that term.
Think about it – when the average webmaster or blogger links to a site, they probably aren’t thinking about anchor text. Therefore, if 50 people naturally linked to an women’s clothing store, they would do it using a variety of anchor text such as clothing, the brand name, or random words like here, website, and so on.
Q8: As per my info one link from an authority site such as PR6, .Gov or .Edu is lot more powerful than thousands of PR1 links. If this is true, do you think one should only concentrate on building authority back links only instead of wasting time on building links from low PR sites?
High authority links are great for your link profile, but they are going to be hard to achieve depending on your website’s industry or niche. Some businesses found ways to get links from EDU sites by offering online discount codes to students and faculty. Of course, a few of those businesses were eventually busted for doing that (see WSJ on Overstock).
It goes back to link diversity – don’t focus all of your link building on one thing, or it sets off the alarm for an unnatural link profile.
Rana Q9: What are your thoughts on building back links using article submissions to directories like Ezine, especially after Google’s panda update?
Kristi: I was never a fan of link building via article marketing in the first place. To really make a dent, you had to be writing a ton of articles on article networks, or taking one article and distributing it a ton of different places.
I found better results from just writing one high-quality article on my own blog and having others link to that, building overall authority to my domain.
Rana Q10: Is there any right or wrong speed to follow when it comes to building back links and also your thoughts on buying thousands of links for a fiver?
Kristi: If you can buy a thousand links for $5, then they are probably some pretty scary quality links. People can say they are getting you a link on a PR 7 domain, but what they might not tell you is what page on that domain they are getting it on, or what other links yours might be placed next to. In general, if you can buy it, so can other spammy sites that you might not want your link associated with.
In general, a new website couldn’t have a ton of links built to them that quickly naturally, unless they become an overnight sensation because everyone starts talking about them or they are already linked to another high authority site. Like Pinterest probably gained a ton of links quickly, but there’s good reason why.
I once was involved in an SEO contest where the goal was to buy a new domain and get it ranked #1 for a weird keyword phrase. The person who bought the .com of the keyword phrase ended up winning, and my domain (the .us version) ended up penalized because I built links too quickly to it.
Rana Q 11. Your 3 favorite link building techniques and why?
Kristi:
- Competitor research – Look at other website similar to yours and see how they are getting links. This is usually a good way to find a variety of links. Don’t focus on one website’s backlink profile though – check out several different, similar sites and try to get similar links. Also, go for the highest quality links from those competitor sites – not the lowest quality. One day, quality will win out over quantity, and you will want your website to be the one with the most quality if possible.
- Guest posting – This is a great way to build links to your website and industry recognition as an authority.
- High authority resource pages – Think about the types of people who will want to find your site. What sites do they search for? If you had an informational blog on diabetes, then search for diabetes resources. Look at the sites that come up to see if they have some kind of outgoing link resources page, then see if you can get your link on one of those pages. I’ve gotten several high authority links for clients on pages based on that kind of search, and best of all – they were links none of the competitors had!
Rana Q 12. Kikolani.com has over 3.5 million back links. Can you please share with us your best formula, which can help us to build few thousand links if not millions?
Kristi: The 3.5 million back links is sort of a fluke. The biggest majority of those come from sites that just have a ton of different pages that happen to have my links on them. One in particular is a site with 2.6 million pages. It would be like getting your link on the sidebar of something like Wikipedia – it’s really all from one domain, but the domain has millions of pages.
What’s amusing is that some of the sites I have a ton of links on are actually scraper sites – sites that pull content from my RSS feed and republish without permission.
Overall, I just did a ton of blog commenting, guest posting, social profiles, occasional articles, blog directories, RSS directories, and similar. Most importantly though, I created a lot of valuable content on my site that attracts links. Having valuable content (also known as “link bait”) will get you tons of natural links that you couldn’t get otherwise.
Rana Q: 13. As you know there are plenty of black hat techniques which can give you results in short term but if you are thinking building a business, what are the common bad practices one should avoid?
Kristi:
- Comment spamming – If you want to get links via commenting but you don’t want to do it yourself, at least get people who speak the native language of the blogs you want to comment upon and make sure they know to read the posts and leave a valuable comment.
- Buying cheap links – If someone offers lots of links at a low price, you will be getting what you pay for.
- Getting links in bad neighbourhoods – Check out the domain you are getting your link upon to make sure they aren’t linking out to other bad sites. You should avoid sites that link out to the top three offenders – porn, pills, and casinos. Also, getting a link on a page with 100s of other links is probably not going to help much either.
- Link exchanges – Irrelevant ones, at least. If you own a dog grooming business you happen to sell dog collars by another business, then it wouldn’t hurt for you to link to them, and for them to link back to you. If you own a dog grooming business and you have a mutual link exchange with a printer ink company, that will probably look fishy.
I hope this post will help you to build high pr backlinks and once again I would like to thank Kristi for answering these questions. I highly recommend visiting Kristi’s blog if you want to learn more.
Don’t forget to Tweet this post and ask any question you may have regarding building high PR backlinks in the comments below.
Phenomenal post, Rana. I knew Kristi was a great resource from reading her comments in SME networking clubs, but she truly is a reference for any blogger wishing to better his or her performance online. Thanks for the great insights! I will have to digest all this information, now… 😉
Totally agree with you Frederic that Kristi is truly a amazing resource and a lovely person to work with.
It is a long post but it will be worth it if you can digest and apply.
Thanks Frederic! 🙂
Rana,
Great interview.
What I really like about Kristi and her approach is that she isn’t just focused on SEO linking.
I am a huge fan of commenting on other blogs but not just commenting to SPAM them but to add value. Maybe comment three or four times on one post if the comments become a discussion. You can make some really good relationships and ultimately people see value in your comments and want to find out what you’re all about.
So they follow you back to your website and Boom. More traffic.
SEO is important but Valuable comments and content is just as important if not more in my opinion.
Thanks!
Ryan H.
I am glad you liked the Interview @ryanhanley:disqus
You are absolutely right, this is the right way to do blog commenting and get many other benefits along the way.
Thanks Ryan! I think that when you do things without just SEO in mind, you still get the SEO benefits anyway. 🙂
Natural growth seems to ultimately be the most powerful.
Thanks again Kristi!!
Hi Rana… Wow, good tips from a pro. Thanks for getting her insight.
Favorite? Her focus on just building quality back links by being an authority. There is so much garbage out there with content and commenting. Yuck.
But if you’re in it for the long haul, you only want quality back links from quality comments and posts on quality sites. Period.
Thanks again Rana.. Good tips my friend… 🙂
Wow, that was intense lol. Kristi and you went in-depth in to some cool aspects of back-links.
What do you think of the school of thought that ‘back-links’ are a digital version of word of mouth, and isn’t really something to ‘manage’?
Nothing like an insightful interview.
Thank you for making it easy for those who hide under a desk when they hear the letters S E O.
Awesome interview!
I find that blog comments are a way of building a relationship with a blogger rather than a way to get traffic.
At least this is how I feel and in many cases, the relationship aspect has been more valuable than the traffic part.
Cheers,
Timo
I have a love/hate relationship with article marketing. I agree with Kristi that you need to write a ton of articles and submit them to a lot of article networks for it to work. This leads to using tools like article spinners.
When I was just starting out, this was my method of choice. It worked great for awhile … until Google de-listed one of my sites. After that, I resolved not to use any black hat tactics. Do it right and think long term. The spammers will fall away while you build a brand and a real business online. Great interview, Rana!
I like Kristis statements, thats all about create quality content. Or as “we in Germany” say: Content is king.
Thanks for the interview, good article.
Kristi is always awesome to read.. I love her blog for several reasons.. It was nice that you took an initiative to get her on your blog and discussing so many things.. Thanks a lot.. And keep getting experienced people so that i can get to learn a lot from your blog.. 🙂
We all know how important backlinks are for any website. They decide what is the worth, revenue and SEO of the website. We’re here to offer you with out backlinking services, providing you with quality backlinks. We serve all kinds of websites and have a place for a website of any niche. If you ever need any backlinking services, we’re the people for the job! Just try us out once, and with our satisfaction guarantee, we guarantee that you’ll be back again the next time you need backlinking services.
Nice post.I have been looking for this kind of list for so long.my search now ends here.ira gold thanks for sharing
Hi, the article is so wonderful, I am interested in it. I will pay attention to your articles..
Great post. I really appreciate your blog and also i am going to bookmark this site and also will share this in major social Networking sites like: Facebook and Twitter.
awesome, i’m very interesting reading the question and answer Rana to Kristi. A lot of word that i can take to inspire me to success in blogging. Nice share dude
nice post i really love this blog thanks for this Love U 🙂
i’m pretty new to seo and trying my hands on it. this article looks good and very informative. hope it would help my rankings
Getting traffic especially free traffic from search engines is super difficult.
thank you for this great interview Rana, I have just started my blog and It was really informative for me…thank you
I am so thankful to Kristi for taking time to answer the following questions with so much authority.
Thanks for providing the detail of this interview of set of these question answers. It will definitely help many people to get solution of their problem regarding these topics. Really nice post and you should be appreciated for this brilliant work.
I think many people has misunderstand the right way to use article submission site as backlink source. They create article and submit to high pr directory site and think they have the backlink with the high pr domain. But it’s not true, your article page in the article directory site are pr 0. You can check using seo firefox or other tool. Its just a backlink with pr 0!! You’re not getiting the backlink from the article directory itself.
So, the actual way to use article directory site as backlink source by create high quality article, submit to the article directory, then someone will search and read your article, they get interested and put the article in their website with your link in. So,you get the backlink.
There is plenty of information out there, which makes things really difficult to find to the point, and authentic information.
The biggest majority of those come from sites that just have a ton of
different pages that happen to have my links on them. One in particular
is a site with 2.6 million pages.
If someone offers lots of links at a low price, you will be getting what you pay for.
i loved your blog..because its a different from other blog.you have discuss all problems and give its answers very correctly.. but i didn’t find out about social bookmarking backlinks techniques..
!regarding Q No.13 you discus about spam links..i have a question that can we use social bookmarking for backlinks?if yes so how can we identify that which social bookmarking site is good or spam?
i am confused because my some websites has been penalized and my company blaming on me that the reason of penalized sites is social bookmarking.i used some German social bookmarking sites..and near to 300 social bookmarking sites of English version with page rank “0 to 9” using with 3 to 4 targeted keyphrase and 1 discription…Thanks in advance!
Adeel, in short you got to understand that Google’s main goal is to rank quality pages and anything you are doing to game the system can be picked up by Google.
Google want to see natural links.
Checkout this post by Neil Patel: http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/05/14/what-you-ought-to-do-if-youve-been-punished-by-googles-penguin-update/
Hope this will help 🙂
Thanks rana shabaz..i know about natural linking..i know that we should f0cus only on quality links..in short i just wana ask that social bookmarking is the part of our seo campaign.can we simply bookmark the relevant product/category pages? OR should we try to bookmark content? like when we write a blog article or a guest article – bookmark this instead of the page.both process are good? Thanks in advance!
thanks for all the above tips
Hey…Kristi ! Thanks for providing the detail of this interview of set of these question answers. It will definitely help many people to get solution of their problem regarding these topics.
Really nice post and you should be appreciated for this brilliant work.
kind regards,
sunny
Stamped Parts
Earlier I was really confused about what is the right way to build high PR backlinks. But after reading this article I really got a wonderful knowledge about that. Now I will avoid bad practices for link building. Thanks a lot Rana Shahbaz for this article and Kristi too.
Thanks guys,it’s helps a lot.Many good SEO tips,I can start a whole new strategy with it.After last Google’s animal i gonna need it big time…do SEO gets hardest every day.Thanks
thanks sir its a very useful us
Thanks for all. I am new for internet marketing field and i think this tips will definitely help me on my work..
Such a very informative interview about backlinks. I’m so glad I come across this blog. This is indeed very useful for newbies like me. Thanks again and keep posting!
Newbie Online Business Kit
Great post and great stuff from Kristi, my favorite writer. I will definitely follow the natural link building strategies to try getting my blog a higher ranking.
Great post, really!!
I used to concentrate a lot more on building links through article submissions ( I still do btw) but maybe it’s time that I look a little bit into blog commenting as well!
Glad to come across this post. I do really appreciate for this information which is indeed very useful. Thanks again and keep posting!
High pr backlinks is Essential for off page seo :).but never spam other blog.
It is such a nice information for Seo’s for back-links
Thanks for inform friends
Thanks for your useful information. I hope, I can improve my website ranks significantly.
i read this post its very useful n very important. i like u r suggestion. n i love it.
thanks for shring.
Rana your blog is really worth reading its really help me a lot on how i can up my page rank in google. Thanks a lot buddy.
Hi there,
Thanks for your article, I’ve found it very educative and useful.
Good to see that people can help each other with useful advices, in this seo industry, a good advice is always more than welcome.
Hi, but i read some article said High PR sites linking to new sites from a blogroll might have a negative SEO effect. So, is it true?
In terms of SEO this information is really helpful for us.With the help High PR Back-links you can get top and natural ranking that your site needs.I must appreciate this post.Thanks a lot and Please keep sharing.
Wow this is an awesome post. I really appreciate these insights and i am going to use them to help to take the PR on my site from N/A to something that i can be proud of. I must also say that i have a great first impression from your post and i am going to be looking out for any subsequent posts from you because i feel it too will be chock full of worthy information, just as this one is.
Kiristi Hines is a great blogger, she has great blogging tips and I am big fan of hers.
This is by far the most well written article about backlinks I have probably ever read. I am going to look through your entire site when I have the time and see what other valuable pieces of information you have to offer. Thanks for taking the time to write this!
I love Kristi and am a regular visitor of her site too! That list of places in which users can find dofollow comments where they can contribute in exchance for a valueable backlink is the perfect example of just how experts like Kristi and yourself, Rana are helping beginners to the industry each and every day!
Really a great piece of information. I got 60 High PR website list and I’m working on increasing my backlinks. Thanks a lot for sharing this information. 🙂
I’ve been working through it too, Lavneet! How much easier is it going to make building a healthy, diverse amount of backlinks from some quality blogs! Enormous time saver, huh!
It’s not fiverr only, buying links in general are against the Google’s terms. Hope this will help 🙂
Thanks a lot, for these very helpful explanation. I am very pleased – that you tell us these things.
have a nice christmas
Excellent and very valuable information has shared over here regarding the various link building strategy glad to visit over here and got this knowledgeable information shared by all the precious member. I have one query regarding article submission that one unique article made by me can be used for submission in article directory how many time.Please if anyone can help me with the exact number it would be a great help.
This is an very very important article..
I am saying this important specially for its content.
Youi see in today’s world almost all small and big companies have websites, even there are websites for domestic purposes.
And it is just not possible, to maintain a CEO by each of this website owners, so it is very important for that website owner to look after the SEO of the website, but most of the time the website owner been ignorant can’t look after this part, and the website gets no rank, and thus the whole purpose is wasted.
But articles or posts like that of yours are so very important for these website owners, since they get a whole lot of infos about websites over there, and most of the time they ended up maintaining a good SEO of the website, and thus they are benefited. Very good work.
Thank you so much for share such a useful link. Backlinks are really very useful for promoting websites.
Thank you for sharing to me for such a nice website. It is very useful to me.