Summary: Gaining links from sites that are blogs and forums (for example) can have value as part of a wider linking campaign – but you should steer away from creating spam and only create genuinely useful content and comments on those sources.
You know you need links and naturally, you want as many good quality links as possible. You may have also looked at volume links as part of your link building strategy, and you’ll know that these have value as part of an all round campaign.
But should you gain volume links from pages that don’t necessarily contain editorial content, or that have changing content/discussions? Firstly, what type of links are we talking about here? These include:
- Forums – there’s two strategies here. One is to post a link in the forum and the other is to have a link in your signature so it appears on every post you make. Either tactic is legitimate but do comment in relevant forums so that the link comes from a relevant page (and is therefore more valuable). Do offer genuine comments that are not just focused on getting a link – otherwise you’ll find your comments quickly removed!
- Blogs – you post comments in relation to other people’s blog posts. Again there’s two strategies – to post a link or, where registration is allowed, to just gain a link from the fact that your name is often linked (or indeed your website) when you post. As for forums, try to leave genuine comments that add value for the reader or you’ll just see your comments removed.
- Guestbooks – to sign people’s guestbook and include a link back to your site. Often you’re promoted to enter your URL when saying who you are anyway. A genuine comment on the value of the site in a guest book is fine – make it specific or you’ll see it removed!
- Social media sites – this is a wide subject as there’s many ways of gaining links, covered in more detail elsewhere. As for forums, you could be directly posting links, or relying on your user profile info for the link back to your site. In all cases, try and understand the nature of social media sites before you start posting links all over the place – they are about relationships between people. Treat other users as you would treat your closest friends or family – you wouldn’t send them spammy links without value!
- Wikis – these are help sites around the web like Wikipedia which allow users to alter the content. You can add links on to articles, usually under a special link section. Be careful though – these sites are moderated by people who really respect and want to uphold their value as open encyclopaedias. They don’t take kindly to spam links and will block your account if you only contribute in this way. Wikis are often nofollow as well so the only benefit is for traffic and getting spidered faster (having said that, I have an info site with a number of links from Wikipedia and they do bring a fair percentage of traffic – the links are to posts which genuinely add value to the topic they’re on).
- Discussion boards – as for forums, you can add links directly into the post or often in a signature or link via your profile. The same rules apply as for forums – keep your discussions of value and on topic.
For each of these, be aware that many sites add the nofollow attribute to their links by default (Wikipedia is such a site). So the only value you’ll get from those links is:
- Increased traffic, if they genuinely are links that people are interested in; and
- The content that is linked to may be spidered more quickly by the search engine (nofollow doesn’t mean the link isn’t followed – it means the link doesn’t pass on any link juice, i.e. doesn’t influence the page ranking of the page it is linking to).
Check out our article on the nofollow attribute for more info.
Steer clear of bots that you can buy which look for sites like the above list and auto post comments on there (with links). This is a black hat SEO tactic and frowned upon by all search engines. They are really easy to spot as the posts are nonsense and the links are all the same. They’ll often be caught by spam filters anyway, so have very little value. Get caught using such software and you’re likely to be banned!
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