TDC Day 29: Day 29 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Some backlinks are better than others - Google values backlinks from sites that have more authority.
2. Ed gives a real world example: “If somebody that you barely know makes a comment on somebody else, it means nothing to you. But if your best friend says that Ed Dale is a true man candy, you will take that a lot more relevantly, at least until you watch the videos.”
3. Today we work on getting authority sites to link to you for that special advantage.

TDC Day 29a: Getting Authority Backlinks (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Like Day 29, we are still building off page authority and getting links - but the difference is today we focus on getting high authority links.
2. Open Market Samurai, your relevant keyword file and the Promotion tool.
3. You will see “DMOZ Submission” and “Yahoo Submission” buttons - clicking on these will bring up a new browser window where you can submit your site to DMOZ directory relative to a specific category or to Yahoo directory. DMOZ is free but is hard to get into and can take a long time to process, you may even need to submit your site more than once. Yahoo costs $299 a year. So you may consider these if there is enough commercial value within the niche you are targeting - GuruBob says that it “definitely will have a positive impact on your rankings”.
4. We are going to look at Yahoo Answers. You’ll notice that you can select either or both Answers for both Open Questions (O) and Closed Questions (C) are now grouped together. They are separated because your ability to comment on a Yahoo Answer is different depending whether the question is open or closed.
5. Do a search in Yahoo Answers for your microniche keyword (example is “vintage electric guitar”), if you don’t get much then go up one level (eg “vintage guitar”) - select both opened and closed questions, hit “Find Backlinks”.
6. In your results lists, you will notice icons with “A” on them - these are Yahoo Answers. The “A” on the white background signifies an open question and the “A” on the grey background signifies a closed question.
7. Click on the title of the result and it will open the Yahoo Answer in a new browser window.
8. If it was an open Yahoo Answer, you can answer it and leave a link to your blog if you are logged into your Yahoo account.
9. If it is closed, you can’t answer it but if it is “Resolved”, you can leave a comment with a link to your blog. If it’s “Undecided” you can’t comment.
10. The links you leave are no follow but they can be source of a lot of “human traffic” from Yahoo Answers.
11. For more authority, consider social bookmarking the Yahoo Answers page to “increase the authority of that page relative to the keyword, which may elevate the ranking of the page as well. In fact, every time you create a link on a web site, it may be your best interest to increase the authority of that page, and you can do that effectively by social bookmarking”.
12. Next, do a search for blogs and forums on .edu/.gov domains (eg select “Blogs: Wordpress (.edu/.gov)” and “Forums: phpBB (.edu/.gov)”) - links from .edu (schools/universities) and .gov (government) websites have greater authority so it’s well worth trying to see if there is anything in your particular niche.
13. Just like with blogs, you can “Analyze All” forum posts or individually and quickly see which forum posts have follow links (F), page rank (PR) and backlinks (BL). If you hit “Analyze All” - you can click on the column headings to sort. Note that some posts may be from the same domain.
14. You can click on the results you like and it will open a new window. Register at the forum and put your blog link into the signature on that forum and respond appropriately to the post. (Note you should also read the forum rules and comply with them.)
15. If you find forums with follow links, this is a really easy way to get .edu/.gov backlinks and you only need a few of these across your targeted keywords to make a big difference.
16. Like with Yahoo Answers, when you answer a forum post you should make backlinks to increase the page’s ranking (eg using OnlyWire/Social Marker).
17. Scribd allows your to create active links as comments so this may give you human traffic. According to GuruBob “For most Web 2.0 sites, your main interest in building links back to your blog is to attract human traffic rather than for search engine rankings. Search engines may not be very efficient in handling nofollow links though, so there may still be some SEO benefits too.”
18. Market Samurai will have updates that will be worth checking out (but won’t be ready for this year’s TDC).

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.