Creative Link Building: Parody Sites

Readers, I came across this site today and it definitely gave me a chuckle and I had to give it a link: JohnCow.com  It is a spoof off of the popular JohnChow.com domain and a great example of a way to get links and traffic by piggybacking off the success of another website. 

Now getting links to a parody site may not be a big money maker itself but once you have a popular parody site you have the option of diverting some of the link goodness off to some of your other sites.  I know there are many more examples of parody sites on the web but I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head, what about you?

5 crafty outside the box link-building tricks & tips

Readers, the following is a guest post from Tom Clitchlow of Distilled.

1)  Ensure you pick up all pages that mention your site but donât link to you. 

Iâm going to let you in on a secret
here…. Not everyone on the internet links to external websites, and when they
blog about your site or mention your site they may not link to you. Thatâs
right, some people donât know how to, some people donât feel the need to, some
people havenât even thought about it and some people are just plain lazy. This
means that if you can find these people that talk about (but donât link to)
your site then contact them, ask them to simply add a link to your site where
they have mentioned it and hey presto, you have a nice relevant and topical
link! Getting these links is like taking candy from a baby and in some cases
you can even get decent anchor text.

So how do you go about finding these pages
which mention you but donât link to you? The manual way is to run searches such
as:

http://www.sitename.com

www.sitename.com

âsitename.comâ

âsitenameâ

Donât forget to run these searches in
Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati (and anywhere else with a search function!).
Just remember that often the top results will all link to you anyway
(especially with the full url searches) so be sure to crawl all the way through
the results.

You can also set up some automation to
automatically find new pages/blog posts about your company. Google Alerts is
one way, I prefer our Reputation Monitor which is a tool for monitoring your online reputation but has some interesting
applications as a link building tool.

2)  Gain links from people trying to hot-link your images. 

If you run a site of any size or any worth
then you will almost certainly have plenty of images on your site which people
will want to steal, borrow, pilfer or just blog about.  Patrick Altoft has written a fantastic
script which allows you to gain links from anyone who is looking to use your
images. Go read the post here.
Just try it for yourself, click the link then right click the image at the top!

Note: This script doesnât prevent people
hot-linking images, in fact it actively encourages it but makes sure that people
give you a link back at the same time. For sites with many images, and in
particular sites with striking images itâs a must to install this script

Patrick recommends only showing this script
to people who come via Google images, I think it depends on what kind of site
youâre running. You could probably build an entire site around image
optimisation and using this script to generate back-links. Read more about image optimisation
from Caydel.

3)  Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. 

This tip comes courtesy of SEOmoz. The idea is very simple and plays on peopleâs
egoâs. In a nutshell, the sites which already rank for your target key phrases
are the holy-grail of links, but it can often be difficult to get links from
them since you are by definition in competition with them (in the SERPs at
least!). So how about creating a competition, or award and handing it out to the
top ranking sites in your sector? Everyone loves awards and the chances are
that people will then link back to the source of the awards. If you want to get
a bit more crafty about this you can even host the awards on a separate domain,
to make it look like youâre not affiliated with it then simply 301 the domain
back to your site at a later date.

Matt was the first one to publicly
announce this trick in one of the whiteboard
Fridayâs but itâs clearly been something SEOmoz have been doing for a while… Case in point?  Which built over 100,000 backlinks. Wow!

4)  Flamebait â like linkbait only flame grilled. 

This one is slightly more left-field than
the others and I wouldnât recommend doing this unless you were sure what youâre
doing and also donât mind a bit of a word-fight! The basic premise? Find a way
to get sued. Working on the any PR is good PR (and equivalently, any links are
good links) Andy Beal blogs about the subject in more depth here.
The holy-grail for this tactic is to get sued by a company who no-one likes,
that way you can get the social media crowd on your side! Other, slightly less
dangerous, ways of doing this are to just be controversial or get threatened by
someone who doesnât understand the internet.

Aaron Wall also mentions this tactic
briefly here.  Number 63 on the list.

5)  Keep it funny schmuck. 

Iâll leave you on a high note with a little
bit of humour. Next time someone famous in your industry makes a big
announcement spend 30 mins with your favourite photo-manipulation software
(mineâs the gimp) and come up with (something funny) .

Note that to make this work you need to
ensure that the you donât offend the original poster (unless youâre looking for
a fight, see point 4) and to keep it light-hearted. Spread the word about your
post and as the original announcement grows, so does word of your amusing
pictures. The ideal candidate for this is a blogger who likes to have a chuckle
â aiming this at someone serious probably wouldnât have as much of an impact
(thatâs why we picked Rand!

 Well thatâs all folks â happy link hunting.
If this gets a good response you never know, I might be invited back to post
again! Either way, if you liked what you read then you can read more from me
and the Distilled guys over on our blog.

Anchor Text Strategy

Readers, Jennifer Slegg has a great post on anchor text strategy that you should check out.  From Jennifer’s post:

So definitely ensure you have variety in your anchor text, even going
so far as having some links linked with âclick hereâ, your
company/website name or simply your URL. Then make a list of all the
possible anchor text combinations and when you get a new link, choose a
different keyword combo off the list. Then once you get more than a
handful, you can go back and get additional links for your most
important phrases, but again being careful to unevenly distribute the
anchor text of those links. Yes, you can definitely give more links to
your most important keyword phrases, just resist the temptatation to do
them all on your top phrase.

Check out the full post…

Setting the Tone With Good Comments

The success of content submissions on social media sites is often dictated by the tone of the comments that take place early on. Even if a great piece of content gets a few nasty comments right off the bat it will have a very hard time succeeding and making it to the homepage.

Users often view the first few comments before even clicking through to the content and begin to form their opinion based off of them. If the comments are bad they will automatically assume that the content is bad too, since other members of the community also feel that way.

The problem with this is that some of the social media sites have audiences that are generally very immature. Sometimes even if the content is remarkable someone will come along that doesn’t agree with it and start flaming it in the comments. Others will see this and follow suit and before you know it your submission will be buried into oblivion never to see the light of day again.

If this is something that you notice happening to your submissions then start asking some of your friends on these social sites to read the content and leave positive comments early on. This will help set a positive tone for the submission and keep people from voting your stories down.

On the flipside of this, bad content won’t make the homepage just because there are a bunch of positive comments that have been left. So it’s not a technique that works if you’re trying to spam your horrible content to the homepage.

What has your experience been with the tone set by comments on social media sites?

How Not To Build Links

Over the past few weeks I have attended several conferences including SES NY, AMA Hot Topics and Ad:Tech San Francisco. Throughout each conference I have encountered tons of folks who are
interested in building or buying links, but most of them are going about it the wrong way. Here is what you should not do:

• Same anchor text – if the majority of your incoming text links contain the same anchor text you probably are not going to rank highly for those terms. Search engines are getting more sophisticated and they can usually tell when people are trying to manipulate their search results.
• Home page links – there is nothing wrong with having tons of incoming links to your homepage, but there is something wrong when the rest of your site has no incoming links. This does not look too natural so you should try and increase the number of links to your internal pages.
• Growth – many of us are impatient (including me) which is why we want to grow our links 10 fold within a few days. Usually massive growth of incoming links smells of search manipulation, which is why you should try and grow at a natural pace. Granted you may get a burst of natural links rapidly from social sites like Digg, but if that happens there is really nothing to worry about.
• Cross linking – linking your own sites together if they are related is a good idea if you want to increase each sites traffic, but not search traffic. In most cases all of your sites are probably owned by the same person or hosted on similar C-blocks. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t link your sites together if it makes sense, but don’t do it just to manipulate search results.
• Leveraging forums – one of the easiest ways to get paid links or link exchanges is by posting on forums asking for links. But by doing this you just created a written record that you are looking to build links. This is probably not a good idea, since the last thing you want to do is to give the search engines ammo against you.

There are probably many more things that you should not do when building links, but these are the ones that most people have asked me about at conferences. What other link building tactics should people not do?