Competitor Link Analysis

Whenever attempting to rank under a keyword term with some form of competition, it’s always advisable to search for the backlinks of your top competitors. To do this I recommend utilizing some form of link analysis tool (for the ability to sort the backlinks by PageRank), however in the absense of such you can always use Yahoo Site Explorer (most link analysis tools pull results directly from Yahoo anyway).

You of course want to check for the most valuable incoming links that each competitor has. The easiest, most time effective way of doing this is to look directly at the PageRank of all the incoming links, and examine only those pages that have the highest PageRank (in comparison to the other backlinks). If you’re using Yahoo Site Explorer, a quick way to view PageRank of all search results is to use the SEOQuake web browser plugin.

Look for the location of your competitor’s backlink on the page, and work out how they managed to place their link there. Most of the time the backlink can be divided into a specific category, such as those outlined below -

Resources Directory: More reputable websites offer a genuine resources directory, or a recommended links page (not a link exchange directory) for their visitors. If your competitor is appearing in such a directory, you should contact the webmaster and recommend to them your own website as a resource to be added to the directory. If you receive no response, then find out the full name of the website owner and conduct Google searches in an attempt to find out how you can contact them via alternative means (think; LinkedIn, Twitter, an instant messenger handle, etc). If all these alternative means fail, why not contact them directly through phone? The worst case scenario is that they’ll tell you to get lost. The most likely scenario is that you’ll not only gain the backlink, but also someone you can network with.

Content Submission: Many websites offer people the ability to submit their own guest posts, create their own custom blogs, write their own articles, or provide some way for guests to submit their own content. The advantage of this is of course you can link to your own website in the content as a reference. The content may or may not be moderated before it’s published. A quick way to determine whether it is moderated is to examine your competitor’s content. If they’ve submitted content that is of good quality, then you too should submit good quality content. If they’ve submitted bad quality content and it has gotten through, then you too should attempt the same strategy without wasting your time writing good quality content.

Paid Links: Paid links are easily identified since they usually appear alongside other unrelated external links. If your competitor is using paid links, you should too. Contact the webmaster of the site in question and offer to co-sponsor their website in exchange for a backlink (to be really sneaky, pick the same anchor text as your competitor and have your link placed before theirs. This will devalue their link). If you don’t have the budget necessary for paid links and your competitor does, then you probably shouldn’t be targeting the keyword term you’ve chosen to begin with.

Blog Comment/Forum Post: This one goes without saying. If your competitor’s backlink is coming from a blog or forum post, then simply register your own account and make a reply to the same post. If submissions to the post in question are closed, then search the website for another forum thread, or blog post, that allows replies/comments. A good way to do this to find high PageRank posts that appear on the blog/forum. This will be covered in more detail in the second strategy later in this post.

Natural Link: These are usually the hardest types of backlinks to replicate, since your competitor didn’t build the backlink themselves, rather their site was naturally referenced by an external source. There are two ways to go about acquiring a backlink from such a site. The first strategy to attempt is to see if any of the previous strategies mentioned in this section can work. Does the page that your competitor’s link appear on offer the ability to submit your own comment? Could you e-mail the webmaster and request that your link be added to the article in exchange for something? If none of these strategies appear likely to work, then you should see why your competitor was referenced. What content specifically appealed to the referencing author? Once you’ve found out what it is, create your own high quality page on your website that covers this in more detail. Then, contact the author and suggest to them that they include a link to your resource as a reference as well.

Believe it or not, this strategy does often work provided that you’re able to contact the author. Remember that if you can’t contact them through the website, do a Google search for their name to find alternative contact methods. If their name isn’t on the website, a simple whois query will tell you who the owner of the website is. If the owner isn’t the person who referenced the competitor’s website, ask them to refer you to the person who did.

Searching For High PageRank Forum & Blog Posts

Forums and blogs are great resources to obtain backlinks from, however most of the pages that your backlink may appear on will have little to no PageRank. There is a way to quickly scan an entire domain to search for blog and forum posts that do have PageRank however. Make sure that you have the SEOQuake plugin installed for this.

For the example, we will pretend our forum is located at http://www.example.com/forum

The first thing to do is to navigate to an actual forum post. The URL may look something like http://www.example.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=29183

What you want to do is copy the URL of the forum post and paste it into Google. You then want to delete the dynamic variable from the URL and conduct a search for only the persistent URL. What this means, is you want to delete the part of the URL that changes with every forum post you visit on the domain, and keep the part of the URL that doesn’t change. Looking at the URL in question, you can see that the end bit 29183 will change with every forum post you go to, whereas the http://www.example.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic= part will always remain the same.

It’s the persistent part of the URL, the http://www.example.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=, that you want to search for in Google. You want to conduct this search in Google using the site: command. The site: command will restrict all search queries to the domain in question. This is a great way for quickly sorting through high PageRank pages on a domain. By adding the persistent part of the URL that pertains to forum and blog posts, you’ll only be searching for forum and blog posts on the same domain. The SEOQuake plugin will then display the PageRank of each result in the Google search results, meaning you can quickly scan every forum and blog post until you find one that is high in PageRank.

For our example, to do this, you would type the following query into Google search: site:http://www.example.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=

You would also need to make sure that your search results are set to display 100 results per page. That way you can find a forum or blog post with high PageRank much faster.

Keep in mind that this strategy will only work for forum or blogs that actually do contain posts with high PageRank. Before you begin, a good way to determine if any forum or blog posts on a domain will contain any PageRank is to check the PageRank of the forum/blog index itself. If this is low (2 or below) then odds are that none of the posts will contain any PageRank of themselves. If it’s high (5 or above) then you can be almost certain that you’ll find something.

Remember that every forum or blog you visit will have a unique URL structure. All that’s important is that you find the URL of an actual forum/blog post and delete the dynamic part of it. You then use the site: command to search for the persistent part of the URL. This rule doesn’t change, even though URL structures can vary greatly.

A common problem…

What happens however if you come across a post that has a persistent string after the dynamic string you need to delete? For example: http://example.com/forum/forumcat=34/viewtopic=34812

As you can see in the above example, the first part of the URL contains a dynamic variable (the 34) followed by the actual viewtopic variable of 34812.

In this instance, you want to restrict a single search query into multiple URLs. How do you do this? Quite simply, you make use of the inurl: command in addition to the site: command.

You put the first part of the persistent URL into the site: command, and the second part of the persistent URL into the inurl: command. For our example, we’d use the following search query –

site:http://example.com/forum/forumcat= inurl:viewtopic=

An easy way to remember what to do is to simply think that a dynamic part of a URL breaks it, and therefore you need to continue it using the inurl: command.

What happens if a post contains three or more dynamic variables? You could separate each variable using multiple inurl: commands. Don’t become needlessly confused with all this however, because in most cases you can ignore most persistent and dynamic parts of a URL. For example, if the post URL was http://example.com/forum/forumcat=37&type=983&viewtopic=2431 then you could in reality truncate your search query to the following -

site:example.com inurl:viewtopic

So much simpler to do it like that, isn’t it? So why did I teach you a more complex way initially? Only so that you could understand the way URLs work and the way that Google searches for things. Once you understand this, you’ll understand ways you can simplify sitewide search queries regardless of whatever the URL string may be.

The same strategy can be used for blog posts, or any other type of dynamic URL. It makes no difference. For example, if a blog post URL was http://example.com/blog/2010/12/an-example-blog-post we could search for blog posts from this domain in Google using -

site:example.com/blog inurl:2010

We would obviously change the 2010 variable to the year we were searching. A little practice and intuition will allow you to use this strategy to pick up high PageRank blog and forum posts from domains very quickly. The same strategy can be used for guestbooks, articles, or any other type of page you want to find on a domain.

A little rant before I begin…

I’m noticing a trend with “new age SEO mystics” who like to say that anything other than creating content on your website is a bad idea, and that any attempt to game Google is a bad idea. It seems that good old SEO techniques are losing fashion, and that people are giving Google an unprecedented level of authority in determining ranking manipulations. They say algorithms are changing so quickly that it’s useless to manipulate rankings. To be honest, I wish this was true. I too wish that naughty forms of off-site SEO didn’t exist. I wish that I could create quality content and have it rank highly without any need to bother with SEO at all. In fact, with the perfect search engine, SEO wouldn’t exist at all, the search engine would be capable of identifying the quality content and ranking it without the need for content creators to be wasting their time advertising. Whilst Google has revolutionized search, and is by far still the best search engine in the world, they’re very far from achieving this standard of perfection where SEO, particularly off-site SEO, is no longer required.

Whilst various major algorithm updates come along and derank a large amount of famous websites every year, you can still look within the most competitive industries today and see them ranking using the same techniques that they used five years ago, all of which involve backlink building. Google at its core has always used a referencing based ranking system, and this referencing system can, as you’d expect, be gamed by building fake references. I could show you countless examples of bad quality Page Rank 7 websites whose incoming link portfolio consists entirely of hacked websites, paid links and spam. These sites have existed for years, and have always ranked, and continue to rank, under some nice keyword terms. What’s interesting is that these “smart SEO spammers” won’t target mainstream niches which are likely to bring them under manual review, however rather niches which not many people exploit.

The interesting thing to note is that, in the absence of a manual review, Google’s algorithms are easily gamed. To believe that Google has some automated sophisticated technology that eventually detects and prevents all types of manipulations is to demonstrate ignorance. So then, the question becomes, how do you game Google’s algorithms in such a way that you’re going to pass a manual review? Well, this is where C-Class hosting has its use.

What C class hosting is not

As usual, the new age SEO mystics like to say that anything that seems “exploitive” is useless and a waste of money. For this reason a common myth has circulated within the SEO industry that C class hosting is useless. Strangely, the people who say this mostly don’t even know what C class hosting is used for. I’ve met some “SEOs” (if you can call them that) who’ve stated that C class hosting is about hosting your website on a C class IP address for SEO benefit. Well, not much to be said there, other than they haven’t really understood what an Internet Protocol is. There’s no such thing as “hosting your site on a C class IP address”. If we required people to take a basic Internet intelligence test before giving opinions and got rid of the crowd who didn’t know what an IP was, this myth would probably not be so widespread. Of course, that will never happen when it’s so fun to dismiss something that one know’s nothing about.

What is a C class IP address?

IP addresses are leased (ultimately from ICANN) to companies or governments, but mostly Internet service providers (ISPs), who in turn sub-lease some of their IP addresses to ordinary consumers. Each IP address is unique, however when a large company such as an ISP leases a large quantity of IP addresses, they will own what’s known as an “octet” of the IP address. An IP address consists of four numbers ranging from 0 – 255. For example, 255.255.255.0 is an example of an IP address (this particular one is a subnet mask for a sub network that divides itself on a class C IP range).

An ISP can, depending upon the number of IP addresses they purchase, change either the very last number in the IP address; otherwise known as the C block (giving them 254 unique IP addresses – 255 and 0 are used for subnetting), the second last number and the first number; the B block (giving them 65534 combinations), or all numbers apart from the first; the A block (giving them 16,777,214 combinations).

Now, if an ISP were to purchase the right to change the last number in the IP address (thus owning an entire C block), their IP addresses would be in the form of (as an example) 69.167.136.xx. Note that the “xx” can be allocated any number from 1 – 254. If I was the hosting company I could set up 254 dedicated servers, each with their own unique IP address. That means one of my clients would own 69.167.136.160 and the other would own 69.167.136.161 (as an example). However, if I wanted to I could create a shared hosting environment, where 100′s of clients could run their website from the one IP address. This means that even though my clients had different domain names, their IP address would be the same. This wouldn’t have any real negative effect upon SEO however, as shared hosting is the most common form of hosting for websites.

Now, what would happen if I received a link to my domain (let’s call it mydomain.com) from another domain (let’s say domain1.com) and they were both hosted on the same IP address (69.167.136.160)? Google would see that the incoming link is coming from the same IP address. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, however what happens if I have 10,000 incoming links from different domains, however they’re all based on the same IP address? Google would detect this as being unnatural and may start to apply some form of filter to the incoming links.

Of course, if you’re acquiring links naturally, then it’s almost certain that every domain you obtain a link from is going to have its own unique IP address. But, if you’re not obtaining links naturally (let’s say you have 100 different websites and you want all of them to point to one of your authority sites), and all of the sites are hosted in the same IP address, then all these sites may be seen as coming from the same owner, and hence incoming links from them may be devalued.

By having each site on a unique IP address, we can hide ourselves as being the owner of each of these websites. So then, if domain1.com had an IP of 69.167.136.161 and pointed to my site at mydomain.com with an IP of 69.167.136.160, then I would be receiving an incoming link from a website hosted on a unique IP address. But there’s still a problem. It’s not that expensive to lease an entire C Block of IP range (69.167.136.xx). Furthermore, most hosting companies own entire C blocks, and therefore if you had lots of incoming links from the same C block, this could also be seen as being unnatural.

What happens if we take it a step further and domain1.com had an IP of 69.167.23.1 and mydomain.com an IP of 69.167.136.160? Now, only the first two octets of the IP addresses are the same. Someone would be required to purchase an entire B block of an IP range in order to own all possible combinations of 69.167.xx.xx. The cost involved of doing this becomes impractical for gaming a single website for SEO purposes. Furthermore, it’s more likely than not that the two IP addresses are owned by different companies anyway. Google will see that the IP’s are different enough to most likely not be related.

So then, if you had 100 unique websites and wanted to interlink them together, or point them to an authority website of yours, it would obviously be best to host them on unique IP addresses that had at least the last 2 octets different from one another. This would look entirely natural to Google and wouldn’t invoke any form of devaluing (provided that there were no other factors that made it obvious all the websites were owned by you).

What C class hosting is

C class hosting, or “SEO hosting”, consists of webhosts who understand the fact that you want to interlink multiple sites you own without raising flags to Google. Normally, C class webhosts allow you to register unique IP addresses en masse, and for a discount (as opposed to opening separate hosting accounts). The IP addresses are guaranteed to, at the very least, be based on different class C octets (meaning that only the first two octets may be the same, whereas the last two will not be, unless the first or second octet are different, in which case it’s irrelevant if any octets after that are the same).

That’s all that a C class webhost is. They simply offer you a cheap way to register many sites with the last two octets of each IP address being different.

When do you need C class hosting?

The only time I’d ever recommend utilizing C class hosting is when you have websites, or are planning to make websites, that are in their own way authoritative and high in PageRank. Let’s say that you had 10 different PageRank 6 websites each targeting different niches. You then setup a new website in a competitive niche and wanted to receive a link from these 10 different PageRank 6 sites you own. You’d want to ensure that the incoming link you had was from a different IP address for each PageRank 6 site, even better a different class C IP address. One way you could ensure that is by using a webhost that offers you unique C class IP addresses.

Remember, C class hosting does not offer you a direct benefit in any way whatsoever. The IP address itself is almost certainly still shared with other websites, just like with a generic shared hosting package. The whole purpose of utilizing C class webhosts however is to ensure your other high authority websites don’t look like they belong to you. This may or may not be of any benefit to you. Most people don’t have many high authority websites, and therefor wouldn’t benefit from unique C class IP addresses. However those who do, will benefit from it. It’s as simple as that. If you’re unsure, chances are you won’t benefit from it.

Avoiding other footprints

Even if you do have all of your authority websites based on different class C IP addresses, there may be other footprints that could identify you as the owner of them. To begin with, you should ensure that each domain is set to private registration or to unique whois details. If the whois data is the same for each domain, then it’s quite obvious they’re all linked to the same person. Other common footprints may be in the design of your site itself. Is your privacy policy or contact e-mail the same on every website? This is another footprint to look out for.

There’s been a lot of debate within the industry as to whether or not data from Adsense and Analytics may be used to track you as a unique site owner. Google states that they don’t use this data at all, however I’m always skeptical about manual reviews and I’d therefore ultimately recommend that you use different code for each of your websites to be on the safe side. This of course isn’t practical for Adsense purposes, however from all evidence seen so far, having the same Adsense code on different websites doesn’t link them together for SEO purposes , even though very obviously it could.

Conclusion

This entire post may seem like a lot of paranoia about something that doesn’t give you any direct SEO benefit. The fact does remain however that if you own a large quantity of high authority websites, then linking them all to a new website you’re creating in a competitive niche is a great way to build up your link portfolio. In order to make this process look entirely natural, it is best practice that each of your authority websites come from their own unique IP address. Whether or not this needs to be on a different class C octet or just a different address is open to debate, however having each of your authority sites based on the same IP address linking to another one of your websites will almost certainly look unnatural.

You see, to become an SEO authority, you don’t actually need to know much about SEO. You just have to be good at giving the appearance that you know a lot. Since search engine optimization isn’t an exact science, and is constantly changing, most of what is recommended or stated as fact is actually unverified. SEO isn’t chemistry where two elements are guaranteed to react in a certain way. There are so many variables that any charismatic, influential person is capable of swaying peoples minds. Once a little authority is established, along with a mailing list, being a “charlatan SEO” (as I think of most SEO authorities) is surprisingly profitable, especially for those people who don’t really know much about SEO.

There is of course a huge market of webmasters after answers, answers that cannot be provided without scientific studies. So, who’s going to fill in the gap and provide these answers? Of course, businessmen. If you haven’t realized that and you think every famous SEO blog you read is accurate, then it’s time to wake up. One way you can realize whether you’re under an illusion about SEO or not is to ask yourself “what is the most profitable keyword term to rank under?” If your answer doesn’t involve an immoral keyword, then chances are you’re asleep. If it does, then look at how websites under that keyword rank, and you’ll begin to see the lies that you’ve been fed.

One common thing that the charlatan SEO will do is find something that real SEOs are doing, and then say that it’s ineffective because it’s not easily understood. They will in turn call these things “SEO myths”. Whilst the majority of SEO is in fact myth, some parts of it are claimed to be “pure myth” when they aren’t (for the reason stated). In this post I want to cover three of the most famous of these so called “SEO myths”, and explain why they in fact aren’t myths at all.

Myth #1: The Google Toolbar PageRank means nothing

Doesn’t it annoy you when someone comes around and tells you that “the Google toolbar PageRank means nothing”? You know these people don’t really know what they’re talking about, and that they acquired their belief from some “SEO authority” or are instead playing on words. Meanwhile after a toolbar PageRank update they’ll hurriedly fetch data on the latest high Page Rank sites to acquire backlinks from. Or, if they don’t do that, then they’re one of the garden variety of SEOs that ranks their websites under non-competitive keyword terms and don’t even realize they live in a world of illusion, filled with what I like to call “SEO placebo effects”. What’s worse, these people are the ones who commonly sell their “SEO knowledge” to third party companies, and make the majority of their income ranking websites under obscure, overvalued terms as consultants.

Of course, any SEO that studies Google’s algorithms is aware, and how patronizing that one must say it, that the PageRank displayed within the Google toolbar is not current and up to date, and not a true reflection of a page’s actual PageRank. But we already know that. Toolbar PageRank is nevertheless the most prominent key factor that we can use to determine the value of a backlink from a page. Not one of the key factors, but the most prominent one, despite what misleading blog posts may tell you. Of course, as time elapses from a toolbar PageRank update the accuracy of the PageRank displayed becomes less certain. Nevertheless, it’s still the most important value we have on how Google is perceiving a certain page’s worth.

Google will tell people not to focus on PageRank, that it’s not that important. This may be true for your own websites, however when acquiring inbound links from other websites, the higher the PageRank and less outbound links on the page, the more value that will be passed. This simple observation holds true, despite whatever Google or anyone else may tell you. We can prove this from simple empirical observation from the ranking of our own websites. Sure, this may change in the future, but as of the time of this post (June 2011), and since 2004, PageRank has been the most important factor for determining the worth of an incoming link. Notice nowhere I said PageRank for your own website is the most important ranking factor? So don’t put words into my mouth either or misunderstand what I said. I said, when acquiring external links, PageRank is the most important identifying factor, along with outbound and internal link count, when determining the link’s value.

Myth #2: Paid Links will get your website penalized

People somehow thing that by being nice, polite, and agreeing with everything that Google says that Google will in turn never penalize their website, and will pass them on a manual review. Talk about self interest. Thankfully Google is, for the most part, against censorship. If Google were to penalize your website because you disagreed with something they said, or because you teach some black hat ranking methodologies, then this would be censorship. If you had enough verifiable evidence of such a thing, you no doubt could blog about it and receive huge publicity. As far as I’m aware however, Google is quite fair when it comes to websites discussing methods they don’t agree with, or don’t approve of.

One thing that many people espouse is how paid links will penalize your website. Now, this is either due to people being fearful of Google spying on them if they say something naughty, or because they genuinely don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s usually a good mixture of both.

There is one short sentence that needs to be understood by every SEO, but that won’t be. And that short sentence is this: Devaluation is not the same as penalization.

What is the difference between link devaluation and penalization?

Link devaluation is when Google’s algorithms, or a Google employee conducting a manual review of your website, detects an incoming link to not be worthy of passing any ranking value through to your website. This may be the case if the backlink is spammy, is recognized as a paid link, is unauthorized, or isn’t deserving of passing the value to your website that it should be. What is the effect of Google doing this? Well, as you may guess, the effect is that the link becomes devalued. Does this mean that your website is penalized? No it doesn’t. It just means that the link doesn’t pass any value.

On the other hand, penalization is when Google actively penalizes your website for breaching its webmaster guidelines. Penalties issued by Google are almost always due to on-page SEO foul play and result from things such as the use of hidden text or links, the setting up of cloaks or hidden redirects, and other bad ideas, including the selling of paid links (remember buying and selling are two different economic actions).

The differences between an incoming link devaluation and a site penalization are vast, as you can see. On one hand Google is simply devaluing an incoming link, on the other they’re actually penalizing your website. Now, if you had lots of spammy, bad quality incoming links, why wouldn’t Google penalize you? Quite simply because (and I’m sure you’ve heard this before) – there’s no way to know whether it was you who made the incoming links or someone else.

If Google did penalize your website in any way whatsoever, due to any type of bad incoming links you had (regardless of whether they were paid links or from bad neighborhoods), then the penalization could be scientifically studied and replicated on your competitors. SEO would become a huge game of deranking your competitors once you reached the top 10 results. Fortunately it doesn’t work like that, and that is the reason why Google doesn’t penalize you for paid links. Yes, that’s right – because they have no way of knowing that you bought the links.

What’s funny is how the charlatan SEOs (as usual, the big name ones) are using this recent example of J C Penney supposedly being penalized for using paid links. In fact, they weren’t penalized at all. All that happened was that the incoming paid links were devalued. Since there’s no way to prove that J C Penney actually bought the links, the most that Google can do is devalue the links.

This had the illusion of a penalization because J C Penney dropped in all of their rankings. However, the exact same effect is noticed from the devaluation of incoming links. What really puts the icing on the cake to prove this point is that the Alexa traffic data before J C Penney conducted its paid link campaign is the same as it is now. In other words, the exact thing you’d expect to see from link devaluation, not website penalization.

Of course Google won’t tell you that they’ve simply devalued the incoming links from any website. They’re quite happy to enjoy people believing that if they do anything bad through off-site SEO, Google will catch them. This however should not confuse you from the reality of the situation, which is that J C Penney simply received a devaluation of incoming paid links, not a website penalization. Remember the prior point mentioned – if a website is penalized for buying paid links, then you can use this strategy against your competitors. Fortunately, since this isn’t what happens, no such strategy exists.

Myth #3: The noachive tag makes outgoing links worthless

This is just flat out a fabrication and widely circulated myth that 30 seconds of original research can dispel. The noarchive tag was designed as a means of preventing search engines from caching a copy of a crawled page’s content. This has no relation to the noindex tag. Search engines crawl pages with this tag just as much as a page without the tag. The tag doesn’t devalue or disregard outgoing links at all. Its sole function is so that search engines don’t store a cache of the page’s content. It doesn’t mean that search engines don’t crawl and pass PageRank and ranking value on to the external links.

There’s really nothing more to be said about this one.

Don’t become a paranoid SEO mystic

Notice how the above three myths all have one thing in common? They’re designed to scare you. Where do you think they came from? From people trying to scare you and create link bait.

If you found that you were certain that something was true, and are now wondering if it is, then what you need to do is something that most people in this industry don’t do: Test what you hear and observe things for yourself. By doing that, you’ll avoid falling prone to newly hyped SEO nonsense which, right now, SEO charlatans continue to create to try and scare you. Don’t become one of their followers and spread misinformation. As a search engine optimization specialist, before you say anything related to your field, you should test it and verify it for yourself, then, and only then, compare the results with others results before comparing your conclusion to currently accepted beliefs. This will ensure you avoid having any wool pulled over your eyes.

People often think that obtaining a backlink from a .edu or .gov site is a difficult task. In reality it’s not. In this post I will explain to you some easy ways to obtain backlinks from these sorts of domains.

There are three main strategies I use to acquire .edu and .gov backlinks, and these are -

1) If I have a good quality website, I will look for educational or government websites that are relevant to my niche and that have a link directory of some form and then e-mail the webmaster requesting that my link be added to the directory.

2) If I don’t have a good quality website (such as a site that’s purely commercial) then I will look for forums that have .edu or .gov backlinks (even if they’re not relevant to my niche). I will register on these forums and place a discreet backlink to my site in the signature field of my profile (with relevant anchor text of course). Every time I make a post, my backlink will show up.

3) I look for website submission forms that automatically add my link to a directory of some kind. You can find these on abandoned/outdated .edu or .gov sites.

First, let’s look at point 1.

In order to restrict Google search to only contain a certain type of domain (such as .edu or .gov) we use the site: command.

If for example we only want to bring up .edu domains, then we would type the following command into Google – site:.edu

If we wanted to only bring up .gov domains, then we would type site:.gov (go ahead and try it).

Now obviously the results that are returned aren’t very useful to us, so what we want to do is restrict searches to websites that are relevant to our niche. We will do this by typing our keyword after the site: command. Let’s say our niche is the automobile niche, so we may be trying to target keywords containing the word “car”.

In order to bring up .edu sites that are relevant to “cars”, we would type the following command into Google – site:.edu car

If we wanted to target a more specific keyword phrase we could type something such as site:.edu “car tires”

Notice that in the above example I used quotation marks (””). This is because I wanted an exact phrase match for the term car tires.

Now the majority of search results that are brought up won’t be of any use. This is because whilst a lot of sites may contain your keyword on them, they won’t necessarily be dedicated purely to your niche.

You want to find a .edu or .gov site that is dedicated purely to your niche. Once such a site is found, you want to look for a “Contact” section somewhere on the site. Send the webmaster a polite e-mail explaining that you have a website that’s relevant to the contents of their website, and request that it’s added. Note that this method will only work if you have a good quality, authority website in your niche that isn’t overly ridden with advertising.

Obtaining backlinks from .edu and .gov forums

Now this second method is one I use the most and is my favourite method for obtaining .gov and .edu backlinks. A lot of my sites have upwards of 50+ .edu and .gov backlinks thanks to this method. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t really matter what sort of site you have, as you’re not targeting anything niche specific.

The method is similar to the previous one, we still use the site:.edu or site:.gov commands to bring up either .edu or .gov websites. Now instead of typing our keyword next to the command, we use another command known as the inurl: command. The inurl: command will force Google to only return search results that have the word we specify within the actual URL (the web address). Let’s say we only wanted to look for sites that contained the word “forum” in the website address, such as http://example.edu/forum/ – the inurl: command would restrict search results to such sites.

Do you see where this is going? By restricting .edu or .gov sites to only contain the word “forum” in their URL, we’re going to bringing up educational and government websites that contain forums! And as you know, forums are a great place to put our backlinks.

Now the word “forum” by itself could refer to a number of things (such as an offline meeting forum) therefore you may want to target more specific online forums such as “phpbb” or “invision”.

So let’s say we only wanted to bring up .edu websites that contained “phpbb” forums. We could do this by typing the following -

site:.edu inurl:phpbb

Notice we have the two commands there. The first restricting search results to .edu websites, and the second restricting those websites to URL’s that contain the word phpbb in them.

Once you register an account on the forums, simply create a signature which contains a backlink to your website with relevant anchor text. If you don’t know how to do this, then have a read over the forum section on my tutorial on Backlinks For Beginners – Part 3.

Make a few posts on each forum before proceeding on to the next one. Make sure the posts contribute to any discussions at hand. Don’t make them sound spammy or you risk getting banned.

Website submission forms

One of the easiest ways to obtain an instant .edu or .gov backlink is to look for abandoned .edu or .gov websites that still have a website submission form that will instantly add your link to a link directory. What we want to do is look for keywords such as “Add link” “Submit link” on .edu or .gov websites.

Once again, we use the site: command to restrict our search results to .edu or .gov sites. Now this time we’re going to be seaching for an exact keyword phrase of “Add link” or “Submit link”. Let’s start with “Submit link”.

So the command you type into Google would be as follows -

inurl:.edu “submit link”

Of course a lot of the sites that come up won’t be of any use, so you have to manually go through the search results until you find a site that will allow you to submit a link through a form of some kind.

Every week I spend an hour or two looking for .gov and .edu sites, and I’ve explained some of the methods I use to do this above. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for these types of backlinks, nor are they impossible to get. Devote a few hours to the methods I’ve mentioned above and you too should have a nice portfolio of .edu and .gov backlinks.