After Jem told me she’d opened an SEO section on Snark, I thought I’d better come and check it out.  Didn’t want to leave you with Rhys filling your heads with stories about the size of his PageRank.  So, Jem gave me an idea what to talk about and here I am.

I was doing some link building today for work, and I was worried about spamming so I've been thinking about better ways to go about it.

My boss gives me a couple of PDFs with links in containing lots of forums and websites where you can make profiles.  She actually pays for these and gets them sent to her every month, and you fill in each profile with your link.  I feel like that's spamming.  I tend to do it if I can contribute something to the forum and I think I'll use the profile again in the future.

So, though using lists of links like that is convenient, they're not really relevant and you're not gonna gain much anyway.

So how can you source relevant links?

Find new communities to engage with and websites to to join by using lesser-known commands to search through Google. 

Example: Let's imagine you have a website or blog about dogs.

Put this into Google:


You could also try:


Et voila, lots of forums about dogs you can join.  Don't just join and post spam about your site.  Engage, talk, chat and build a following, remember the more times you post, the more you'll be exposing your signature links. 

But again, stupid spammy comments are not the way to go.  Spamming will just get your posts deleted - and then what's the point?

Google will see the relevant links pointing from all those dog sites to your dog site and be happy. (Unless, of course, you think nofollow links are pointless.  But there's a lot of debate and a few studies about those too - I've read different takes on it and I've decided all links are good links.)

So what else?

Directories:  I tend to only submit to business directories that are fairly good quality or directories specific to the theme of my site.  E.g. directories about pets or animals.

Viral:  Create something of value (think Plug-ins, software, eBooks, etc) something interesting (blog rant for example) or something hilarious (joke videos, pictures etc) and watch people share it and build links for you!

There's more too - so let's discuss!

Any SEOs here?  How do you get links without spamming?

Welcome to Snark and great read!

In terms of getting a site out there I tend to, and with some affect, try and get the designs featured in CSS galleries. A very common trend is to submit your site to a gallery submission site, which in turn submits your design to a large list of CSS galleries. Nothing wrong with having a large amount of gallery websites linking to your site and designers getting some inspiration?

What I do is provide a resource. Mine is my Wordpress plugins, which builds the following link portfolio:-

- Link from Wordpress.org
- Link from Weblog Tools Collection & similar wordpress sites
- Inclusion of a "Link back if you like it!" tickbox in the plugin & you get links from the blogs.
- Links from bloggers blogging about your plugin

All those are links from multiple domains, which is great

From a blog, I'd definitely create a resource that's link to. Could be a "Top 10...." lists for example. Linkbait with people (blog about people) and they'll link back to you (hopefully). There's loads of ways, and that's just from blogs

oh the irony.