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.