Free Blogs

Free Blogs are a great way to build some high quality links for your site.  I’ve stated in previous posts the huge advantage a person has by owning several websites.  This tactic evens the playing field a little bit, and allows you to do the same thing by taking advantage of free blog providers online.  First I should state that starting a free blog for the purposes of link building or SEO is often against the hosting sites rules and I do not condone this action(be careful and be discrete).

This method can be very effective given the high PR of most free blog sites.  PR is Google’s measuring stick, telling you how valuable the particular site is perceived to be by Google.  These links are high quality because they come from trusted sites.

Now, if you simply go spamming the free blogs you are just going to get your free blog banned, so lets use some class in doing this.  One thing that I like to do is write a generic blog post in word, then spin the article a little (spin – keep same content and present it in slightly different language) for each free blog site that I plan on posting it on.  This means I write 1 article and alter it slightly for each blog so they all appear unique to the SE’s.  When possible you always want to use ANCHOR text for a link, meaning that the hyperlinks should be inside of the article attached to keywords that you are trying to rank for.  Use your imagination and come up with a similar game plan.  You may even want to put 1 link to your site, and 1 link to another ‘free blog’ that you posted on for quick indexing.

I’m not going to give you a list of free blogs to use because they are increadibly easy to find.  Type “free blog” into google, and that should keep you busy for a while.  I would obviously start w/ Wordpress and Blogger and then move on down the line.  A good percentage of the blogs use WP or a similar platform, so you should be right at home.

If you have ever seen, under the comments sections, something that says TRACKBACK or PINGBACK, these comments are automated.  If you pingback a blog owner, often times they elect to automatically link back to the page that linked to them.  These pingbacks can be very valueable and I highly recommend that you take advantage of them.

Anytime that you cite another blog, if you link to it, you can have WP send the pingback.  You can turn this option on under Settings/Discussion.  Although the link back will be recipricol, if you get a successful trackback/pingback, it will often be from a blog that has more link weight than you do.  Recipricol links are not as good as one way links.  They are however, still valueable expecially if the other site is more respected than yours.

So our objective is to get all of the comments that we have made noticed by google bot so we can pick up our sweet links.  If you simply post a comment, then there is a reasonable chance that search engines will never pick it up.  The solution is to gently guide the search engines to check out those links.  I’m going to give you a quick easy way to do this.  Please, be creative and try different ways to make this work for you.

1. First thing to do is to make a list of all of the pages that you made a comment on.  If you make a comment, and it goes through, save the link in a notepad document.

2. Now sign up for an account at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog.  Now write a post that includes links to all of the comment pages that you saved.

3. Now sign up for an account at digg.com.  Now submit your wordpress or blogger post that has the links to digg.

That is all there is to it.  If all goes well your digg page will be indexed quickly.  It will spit google bot out at your free blog, and your blog will spit google out to all of the links that have your comments on them.  Now I’m not saying that this is a fool proof method or 100% successful.  This method can however be applied in a number of different ways boosting its effectivness.

Note:  Don’t use your own blog to post links to the comments you made.  You’ll be turning your 1 way links into recipricol links and screwing up the link weight.

• http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp
• http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
• http://blo.gs/ping.php
• http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
• http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html

And don’t forget to sign up on technorati and claim your blog.  I got the links above from this link.  The above are the live links under submit blog and blog rss feeds that don’t require you to sign up to submit a url.  If you have the time, try all the links on the page, make accounts at all the sites and submit your RSS everywhere.

Although google may one day have a fast working facial recognition algorithm, that day has not yet come.  Because of that google relies heavily on what the webmaster says about the photos presented.  A smart webmaster can use this to their advantage.  To the best of my knowledge, google is looking at the name of the image file and “alternate text”.  This is why you should always RE-NAME your image files for SEO purposes.  I like to use the name of the person, and possibly one short descriptive term.  In the alternate text, I will then again mention the persons name and give a small caption about the pic.

I’m sure that other factors, such as the title of the page, contents of page, make a difference also, but you have to have the name and the alternate text right.  If you are uploading your own photos (hotlinking will get you no where),  then save them to a good name before uploading.  When you upload the image, make sure that you edit the “Image Caption” field.  This is also known as your alternate text.

You should be creative with your alternate text, trying to draw people in on longer keyphrases.  If you have the spare time, you may even want to go back through your old posts, and add alternate text.

Really what you are dealing with is “Free-speech” and it is a doubled edged sword to the blogger.  By allowing comments you allow interaction with readers and by allowing trackbacks you allow interaction with other blogs.  While this is all well and good, this interaction can often be a nuissance to big sites, but will rarely keep you tied up with a site that is growing.

Not only do I recommend that you allow comments, I suggest that you allow users to link back to their website.  Now I know that some are scratching their heads, saying “why would I allow a competitor to put a link on my site?”  Believe it or not, this will benefit you in the long run.  First, those blog owners who are in your niche and just starting out need links and they know it.  Because of that they are usually motivated to leave thoughtful relevant comments in hopes that the blog owner will allow it.  Getting a discussion going in comments is a good thing, and a good way to get someone to bookmark your site.  Sometimes they are not even interested in your site, but they are interested in seeing responses to their comments.  If you don’t allow users to link back to their site, you are repelling good comments.

If you are attracting blog owners who are leaving legitamate comments, then visit their site and do the same.

ADVANCED STRATEGY:

If  you know PHP or a scripting language, then you can automate this process.  Run a CRON job, that goes through your comments everyday saving urls from comments.  If the page is a blog, go to most recent post page and leave a comment saying:

“I enjoyed this post, great blog you have here.  Thanks for the visit to my site!”

or something stupid that has a good chance of getting through moderation.

On Technorati pages, they now have what they call “Blog Reactions.”  A blog reaction occurs when any blog links to another blog.  The short of it is, the more blog posts you make with blog links in them, the more pages that your link will show up in at technorati.

So if you make a a blog post and put a link to thisblog.com, you will show up under blog reactions on thisblog.com’s technorati page.

When you just get started, you want to get indexed and start building links as soon as you can.  If you claim your blog on technorati and then post with links to other blogs, then you can get a strong start with several links.

Apply this method with blog commenting, digg submissions, article submissions, etc. and you’ll get off to a very nice start.

P.S.  I don’t know if you can take this overboard or not, and I’m not sure how much weight a link from technorati gives you.  Any link is a good link for a new site.  I will do some research on this and let everyone know.

If you are just starting out and looking for blogs to post on, you will probably notice that many of those blogs use no follow tags for comments.  Don’t let this deter you from posting a comment.  Scouring through all the blogs trying to find ones that don’t use the no follow tags is a waste of time.  You are better off making comments on each and every blog that you come to that allows a link.

If you watch your logs, you will notice that google bot will show up on your page and the referring link will be from one of your no follow comments.  There is no doubt or argument that google follows these links.  What is arguable is that the no follow links may not carry as much weight.

Although many experts still contend that there is value in the no follow tags, Matt Cutts has publicly stated that webmasters should take down their no follow tags.  Although he hasn’t actually said it, I don’t think the difference between a no follow link and a regular link is substatial.