Article Submission Review

Links For Links – Getting Free Links You’re Likely Overlooking

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In SEO we go through a lot of hoops to get links. We write tons of content, pay monthly subscriptions to dozens of sites, spend countless hours looking for good sources of links and are continually on the prowl for more. But the easiest links to get are the ones you’ve already got! (Yeah, you might wanna go back and re-read that.) This is so simple that most people overlook it and it makes a lot of sense if you stop to think about it.

The process of submitting articles to countless directories, purchasing SEO press releases, profile links, blog posts, etc… creates a lot of links indeed. The problem is that many of them fall by the wayside pretty quickly (you would be surprised if you really paid attention and tracked them over the course of a year). Many others get created but never ever get indexed. Again this is a much higher percentage than you may believe. Generally it can be about 50%, but often times it can be much higher. It is not uncommon to see as many as 80% of the links created not end up in the Google Index. This is actually one of the arguments against article spinning is that many of the versions will not get indexed if the spinning is not performed in an appropriate way (meaning if you take the easy route, you won’t get great results).

Getting Your Links Organized

The first thing you need to do is get organized – yeah, I know, no one likes to hear that, but it’s the truth. Now, you don’t have to get overly sophisticated here. While we use a database to track all of this, it is not necessary. You can just as easily maintain your list in Excel or even a flat text file with notepad. Yes, sorry Mac lovers, I’m a Windows guy. Actually, I think my next notebook will be a Mac Air – I love that thin little gem – but that’s a different topic.

In order for this type of approach to work, you need to change your process and workflow a bit. Anything that you do that provides you with a list of URL links, you need to feed into your massive list of links (okay, well, if it’s not massive yet, that’s the goal). So if you order a press release and it gives you a list of links, make sure and save those off to your database. (I’m going to use the term “database” generically here, whether it’s an Excel file for you or a simple text file, I’m just going to refer to it as a database.) If you purchase an article submission package and it includes URLS, again, load them into your database. Another thing you can do is create several Google Alerts for your domain and such and when you see those links that are yours add them into your database as well.

Make Google Spoon Feed You The Data You Want

This is a great little blog post on the Top 10 Uses For Google Alerts if you haven’t already checked it out. Lots of creative ideas to get you thinking about how Google Alerts can help your SEO efforts.

Sorting Through The Mess

Now, the next part is a bit more complicated and honestly I’m gonna tell you how I do it. I’m sure that there are free ways to do this – I don’t know – but what I do is use Scrapebox. Scrapebox is a terrific little tool that does all kinds of SEO magic. It has a bit of a “dangerous” reputation because many spammers use some of its more powerful features to “abuse” what it can do. Personally we don’t use it for any link creation or blog comments or anything like that. Here are just a few things you can do with Scrapebox:

• Load a list of URLS and check to see if they are “alive” (if the links are still valid or if the content has been removed)

 

• Check a list of URLS and see if they are Indexed (in Google, Yahoo, etc…)

 

• Quickly strip and remove duplicate URLS from a list

 

• Check the PR (PageRank) of a list of URLS – either the PR of the full URL or just the root domain

 

• Automatically load and parse a valid XML sitemap and return a list of URLS

 

• Etc, etc, etc… There are dozens and dozens of features – these are just some that are most relevant to this particular blog post

 

Check out Scrapebox (or its free Link Checker)

If you want to checkout Scrapebox further, go here to take a look: http://scrapebox.com (this is not an affiliate link, so no bonuses available if you purchase). Just remember, we don’t condone any abuses of the powers that it offers. It is just a tool – how you use it is up to you. Also there is a free link checker that they make available as well at: http://www.scrapebox.com/free-link-checker

So before we start cleaning up the database, I want to give you a great little tip on how to find thousands and thousands of links you didn’t realize you had. Go to MajesticSEO.com and register for their free account. Afterwards, log in and go into the reporting area. There is the ability to generate a backlinks report for your site. Now, you can only do this on your own site because you have to create a verification file and put it on the site via FTP to prove that you own it and have access to it. This report will give you more links than you ever believed you had. However, it will contain many duplicates as well as dead links and URLS which no longer point back to you.

Now, whether you start with a free analysis from MajesticSEO or from your own list of URLS is not relevant. The steps you must take are all the same no matter what.

• Step #1: Load the URLS into Scrapebox (or whatever other tool you choose to use) and eliminate the duplicates. That’s easy, but necessary. If you don’t have Scrapebox you’ll have to find an alternate way to eliminate the duplicates (some create sorting and filtering in Excel should do the trick).

 

• Step #2: Next you need to check if the link still exists. Is it “alive” or a “dead” link? Now Scrapebox has a free plugin that will do just that. It will go out and check one by one all of the links and see if they still exist. You can even check them to make sure that they link back to your domain as well. Though many of the boosting programs will do that automatically.

 

• Step #3: See if they’re indexed. Now that you’ve (a) removed duplicates, (b) removed dead links and (c) removed those that do not link back to you, you’ve got a clean list of URLS. Now we need to analyze the list to see which ones are present in the Google Index. Again, we use Scrapebox for that because it is push button brain dead simple, but you can always do this manually if you only have a small amount of links to check, but I highly recommend Scrapebox or it’s free link checker.

After performing the above tasks, you’ll have a clean list of URLS that are linking back to your site, are valid and you’ll know which ones are and which ones are not indexed. That’s the key to all of this.

Links For Your Links

Now, personally, this is just not worth it to me unless the system is automated. Creating content for the sole purpose of using it to create links to try to get your old dead links “alive” again, just doesn’t make sense on the ROI scale for us. You have to apply some common sense here and realize that if these links were either (a) deindexed or (b) never indexed, that they are not likely to be the highest quality of links. If you’ve got a link on CNN, trust me, it’s gonna stay indexed. So this next step only really makes sense if you have an automated and easy solution for getting your backlinks indexed.
Nowadays there are several programs for doing this. We tried out several of them and there are really only two that we endorse at this time – Backlink Energizer and Backlink Booster. The purpose of these two programs is very simple – to get your non-indexed links, indexed. The approach that they take, however, is a pretty different, so you need to take a look at them both and see what makes the most sense for you.

Backlink Energizer is a plugin based solution and is most appropriate for those that want to control the entire process themselves. The setup is more elaborate than that of Backlink Booster but if properly implemented it tends to yield higher overall indexing percentages. Backlink Booster, on the other hand, is a very simple and 100% hosted solution. You set it up and let them do all of the dirty work. You don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain, so to speak, but ask yourself this – do you really care?

This post is not meant to be a comparison of these two products (that will come later with reviews of each as well), but you can get a pretty decent feel for them and make up your own mind. To us, time is money. The plain and simple fact is that we want a simple solution that takes minimal time and yields decent results. For those reasons we personally use Backlink Booster, but we have used Backlink Energizer as well and as we said above and do feel comfortable endorsing it – it actually will produce better results if you put forth the effort.

With Backlink Booster you can simply upload a list of URLS (after it’s configured – about 5 minutes of effort per domain you setup) and tell it to work its magic. Seriously, that’s all there is to it. Then you can check back in once a day or every couple of days and reboost whatever you want. I tend to simply reboost everything for two or three weeks and then “reassess” what needs to be put back in and what can be removed. You can’t expect that one trip through its boosting process will make a huge impact because it doesn’t. Also, even if a URL is already indexed, it doesn’t hurt it to boost it anyway with a little more link love.

What’s the End Game?

The reason for doing this is simple. Let’s say that you have a common scenario and that only 1/3 of your links are indexed. That means that if you could get half of those that are not indexed to be indexed you would literally double your active link count. That can have a real impact. But again, if you have to do this manually I just don’t see the value. Time, money and resources would be better spent on trying to acquire newer and higher quality links in my opinion.

Fortunately programs like Backlink Booster and Backlink Energizer make this process fairly hands off and in that fashion I think it makes a lot of sense for most sites. In the beginning you won’t have a lot of links to deal with, so it probably doesn’t make sense if your site is 4 months old or less. But after you begin to build a sizable database of links, these tools can easily cost justify themselves.

Summary

Well that’s it, the rest is up to you. Choosing to get links for your links may or may not make sense for you, but if it does, it’s one of the easiest (if you use automated tools) ways to get new links because you’re really just “waking up” old dormant links you already have. Be sure and let us know what you think in the comments section below!

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Tags: getting links indexed, links for links, scrapebox, scrapebox link checker