Like many of you, I have done article marketing, forum profiles and blog comments to get link juice and solid backlinks. As I was running through a few of my blogs checking out if the Article Rank articles I posted 2 weeks ago have shown up, I have noticed that one of my sites built in January has a solid PR3 on the main page and PR2 on a few of the other posts. When I look at where the links were coming from, I noticed the majority of the links showing up in YSE were from a blog commenting run I had outsourced. In Google Webmaster Tools, I can see my ezine articles are still present but with the new way the webmaster tools now display backlink information, its far more difficult to see whether as to if any AR links are now showing up. I miss the days when Google Webmaster would list the bulk of your links and you could easily click on the link and it would take you to the source. It also used to tell you the date the backlink was indexed. Now you get zilch information other than the domain name and to what page the backlink is pointing to on your site. Its quite the nuisance.
So anyhow, back to the blog comments. The PR3 site has 46 backlinks and here’s the breakdown of where the backlinks are coming from:
3 links – UAW
2 links – SEOLinkvine
2 links – social bookmarking
39 links – blog comments on PR3-5 (all done in March 2010)
The site is currently #21 and has 785k competition for a broad search and 692k for exact. Its #9 for exact. But I never pay attention to exact rankings cause no one searches in quotes for keywords. The fact that this site has a PR3 with no link exchanges (some of my sites have used 3 way link exchanges) and only from one way links via blog commenting and a few articles, its obvious the juice getting passed onto my site is from the blog commenting.
I’ve decided to refocus on blog commenting for now and put article marketing on the back burner, once again.
How To Find Juicy Blogs To Comment On
Scrapebox - Many people have abused Scrapebox to spam the crap out of blogs. Google is onto this and so are the blog owners. The best way to utilize Scrapebox is to scrape only high PR blogs and manually (yes, I do mean manually) comment on the posts. In the site example above, my blog commenter was originally asked to post links on 80 different blogs for my main page. Of those 80 only 39 are currently showing up in YSE. There might be more than the 39 comment backlinks that exist but unfortunately YSE is still being screwy lately. But anyhow if you look at the numbers, 39 out of 80 is still not a bad ratio. Yea, its only 50% but I guess that’s a good way to look at it. 50% of your manual backlinks can stick. Obviously manual backlinking is going to increase the chances of the links sticking.
To use Scrapebox effectively you will need to purchase private proxies. You might be asking why are proxies necessary. Google can detect when you are running automatic search inquiries (which is what SB is doing.) So if you want to risk having your IP ban from Google for as long as 20 minutes up to 6 hours, then by all means go ahead and run SB without proxies. For those of you that are smart and don’t want to piss off Google, get proxies. I like using Your Private Proxy. The monthly membership price is really reasonable. You only need to the 10 proxy package, this will be more than enough. The proxies are 100% reliable and they are one of the only services that allows you to use the proxies with Scrapebox. Many of the other proxy providers have a strict rule against using “their” proxies with Scrapebox. I also use my same proxies for Bookmarking Demon and Sick Profiler, so it really is a good package.
Here’s a quick video showing you how to use Scrapebox.
CommentLuv – Use CommentLuv. Posting on sites that use CommentLuv is already guaranteeing you of do-follow links.
Kelly’s keyword search - Kelly suggested entering “keyword phrase recent comments” into google. This does work. I tried it and its a pretty cool trick. But the only thing is if you wanna check for sites that have a high PR and use Do-follow links, you will need to use the SEO Firefox Plugin. Turn on the plugin and just under the SERP listing check out the site’s PR.
I entered “Just James at elance recent comments” and this is the listing I got. (Haha my own blog comes up as #6 with James’ blog at #3). Anyhow, in this example this blog I circled has a PR 3.
Now to check and see if the blog has dofollow links.
Doh! The SEO Firefox Plugin will highlight nofollow links in pink. Since the links are highlighted in pink on this blog, it means that the links are nofollow. There is still much debate as to whether or not nofollow links pass on link juice or not. So if I found a high PR blog that had nofollow, I would still post to it. Not only do you still get a backlink from your comment but you can also get additional traffic from it.
Do-Follow Diver - Dofollow Diver can easily spit out for you a bunch of website pages based off of your keyword that are dofollow. It also has a quick tab which lists the sites that have CommentLuv on them as well as use the Top Commenter widget.
“Borrow” From Your Competitor - If you use YSE, you can look up the links your competitor uses and post on the same forums and blogs they did.
Now Onto Forum Profile Backlinks
One of my competitors has ranked at #3 for the main keyword since pretty much I launched my site in February. He has 147 backlinks all from forum profiles only. He continues to only build forum backlinks. Not one ezine article or any other article shows up as a backlink for him. Just forum profiles. As I looked at his profile backlinks, he has forum links from April and May that are still present. Now I have 126 backlinks and you think I should be right behind him in the rankings right? Nope…I am sandboxed and my backlinks are from 3 way link exchanges and article marketing only. I am pretty certain that if I tweak my on-page SEO with SEOpressor and throw some profile backlinks, I should be ranking closer to him.
How To Get Forum Profile Backlinks
Again, you can use Scrapebox to harvest high PR forums with dofollow links by following the video tutorial below.
Once you have harvested your forums you can then use them in Sick Submitter (I love love this software because it does all the work for you.) You can build lists in Sick Submitter lists by following this tutorial. I am still pretty new at building lists in Sick Submitter so I can’t be of much help, but if any of you have some suggestions or tips, I’d love to hear it.
As much as I love article marketing (note sarcasm) it still remains to be the least effective method for getting both quality backlinks and link juice. Sure, its great for getting lots of backlinks and if you post in an article directory like Ezines then does count as a quality backlink but generally when you use article submitters whether it be through a service such as Article Ranks, Unique Article Wizard or software programs like Magic Article Submitter, you are going to get low quality back links.
I have about 10 articles going through Article Ranks as we speak and it seems like the first submission is capping out at being distributed at only 25 times. I noticed it hit 25 submissions a few days ago and has not budged since. If that’s as far as it goes, I will be greatly disappointed. I would be further disappointed if those 25 links never even show up as backlinks. As of today, not one is showing up in YSE. Its been 12 days now too.
So, I am going to return to my backlink efforts that include blog commenting on high PR blogs and forum profiles.
RSS Feeds
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Hey! I have been reading your blog a lot recently and have been checking back for an update! Glad to see you posted one today.
I have recently started out on my quest for internet income. I have built an authority adsense site and I am currently back-linking it now. All of my pages are within the top 50 so its all good! I am not going to continue with adsense any more though as I feel I could be making a lot more using the same concept alongside affiliate marketing. I just like the idea of not ever being able to be banned, getting more money, and obviously being able to warm them up and pre sell… this always helps conversion. I don’t like being at the mercy of Google for my income.
I use dragon naturally speaking to write all my articles and comments, I am averaging around 500 words in 11 minutes which I think is quite productive, couple this with the best spinner its phenomenal!
I use scrape box too, and I am having a lot of really good results with it, I don’t know if you actually know, but SB has plug-ins which you can use to check batches of blogs and whether they are no follow, contain malware, or whether they are moderated and open for comment…the list is endless. I just use harvested proxies on it and I do fine.
The secret is in the type of foot print you use. I have a list as long as my arm if you would like them, you have my email with this so why not drop me a line and I will hook you up.
Again thanks for you great post!
I don’t do forum profile backlinking (just haven’t gotten into it yet) but I often do blog commenting manually. Yes, it takes much longer to actually type an original comment, but like you said a lot more of them stick and you don’t risk your site being reported for spam as well. Plus, I get sick of all the spam comments on my blogs and don’t feel like leaving them on others. There are a couple different ways that I find blogs to comment on (some of them you mentioned) and have never run out of sites to comment on for my sites. Which reminds me I should probably throw out a few more blog comments on some of my sites.
Tiffany recently posted..Easy Paycheck Formula is Back Open Learn Article Marketing the Right Way
My lowest distribution on AR is 77. I’m surprised you are stalled at 25. Could be the category?
It’s interesting that your site does so well with comments and profiles. I always think of articles as having better longevity but maybe I need to rethink that. Thanks for sharing all that.
Hey, what ever happen with Blog Blueprint. Have those links disappeared?
Carrie recently posted..Site 1 Focus – Week 2 Update
Blog Blueprint blows IMHO. My links all were de-indexed within 3-4 months. I was not the only one to notice this either. A bunch of us on xfactor’s forum complained about the links dropping off. I’m pretty certain Google caught onto them. Although they claimed the blogs were on different class IPs a couple of us had noted finding some on the same.
In regards to my AR article, the catagory was health – all. It was only rejected 4 times out of 29 submissions.
I think your numbers will go up – I rarely check but went back and see that some of my earlier submissions, which I thought capped at 65 or so – are now showing 177, 154, 152…
They drip them out themselves, over time – and unlike other submission services like UAW, there’s no dancing (unless you blast multiple articles, but even then, I sent out 9 on a few runs and they’re all on page one – the sites, I mean).
Anyhow – I don’t think you’ll see that number stick at 25. A watched pot never boils, though.
lol
So: you and Michelle are sick SEO’s – I’ve not crossed over yet (I might, who knows?) but what I like about Sick is that it sounds easy.
Is it still $19/mo? Also: don’t you have to buy packets – or are you just building your own?
Last question:
Did you read Michelle’s post (back when) about how she scrapes free proxies? Have you tried them? Just curious because she’s sick, too, and I’m pretty sure she only uses the free proxies (I hated that when I was using BMD in the Spring: paying for Proxies, only to find out I did my submissions “too aggressively” and found I didn’t set up the proxy correctly: my IP was banned from a bunch of social sites).
Then someone called me a spammer…and that was it. I’m organic, darn it – not full of nitrates!!
I love your posts where you talk about these easier methods, though – I can live on the shortcuts. Keep up your bomb tips, Sara!
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Article Marketing Robot Discount And Review Update
Actually I’m doing Sick runs as well, not as often though as I used to and this thing really works even till today. The software is very easy to use and with the free packets already you can do a lot of things. Love it!
Great tips on finding the blogs and forums Sara!
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I find blog comments to have the lowest longevity between them, articles, and profiles. They’re good for some quick links, but in the past I’ve seen many of them disappear or turn to nofollow within a few months.
S recently posted..October 2010
You are probably commenting on the wrong types of blogs / networks. For instance, all of my links from over a year ago, from this blog in particular to my personal blog (matthewdc.com) are all still showing.
If you do blog commenting right, they shouldn’t be getting de-indexed. If you are hiring it out to some services who are known for commenting on tons of random non-related blogs or who are posting to low quality auto blogs, those blogs will probably disappear altogether over time.
Matthew DC recently posted..Link Building Software – 5 Recommended Tools To Build Links
Can’t say I agree re: blog comments – they’re easy, yes – but you also need to be pretty smart about it. Leave a decent comment, and commit to 10 blogs a day, or 20 – it’s really not a lot of time (half hour?).
I’m ranking my wife’s hub and so far, the blog comments are the quickest links and the higher PR (I used SEOQuake to pick them out). The result? Jumps of 200 spots (3 links from PR 0-3 blogs, it started out around #500 since it’s more competitive).
Also – my blog only has really used blog comments. All legit, natural commenting, the way it was meant to be – not spammy chum. You’ll see a natural link attrition no matter what, though: forum links, articles, blog commenting…the only exception would be a guest post on a long term blog, or an article in a directory that’s showing the links.
For some reason EZA has been NOT showing up…not sure what’s up.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Happy Cow And Gettin Cheesy Widdit
I do a lot of commenting, mainly just through my daily reading within the blog-o-sphere, and I have noticed both a positive upswing in rankings, as well as traffic from interested readers. Blog commenting to me is the most worthwhile form of link building (and ethical), if you are actually reading articles in your niche that you are interested in , and leaving some sort of valuable feedback in your comments.
I myself often go check out other peoples links in the comment sections if their titles are intriguing and they actually sounded knowledgeable. So in my mind, commenting is a double whammy.
Also, I think blog commenting is fine as far as longevity goes, as long as you know the blog isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Most times, once the comment is approved, it is going to be there for the long haul, unless the site is banned or they stop paying their hosting bill.
I will say tho, that article marketing still has to be a part of your routine. Using services like UAW or AR, is the easiest way to get decent quality links, on a larger scale, with minimal work. Real, honest to God commenting can take a lot of time for few backlinks, where as articles are kind of “set it and forget it”.
Anyways, great article Sara and i’m glad to see you posting a more frequent basis again. I always get excited when I see your name in my feed list!
Matthew DC recently posted..Link Building Software 5 Recommended Tools To Build Links
Ditto that. And that’s really the only way I backlinked TAG – except on certain money pages, where I used article blasts, the majority of my links are blog comments. The benefit is pretty cool.
But – Sara – did you do the commenting to an XFactor site? (That just occurred to me.)
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Losing Backlinks And Ranking SEO WOE
Great post Sara,
As always very informative and useful. What you’ve mentioned about forum profiles is actually spot on. I also at the beginning of the year did some manual building of profiles which took forever but I’ve also noticed that a lot of these have still remained intact. I even outsourced these and theyve also remained with do-follow links.
I don’t really do blog commenting as I think its just too time consuming but in the back of my mind I soooooooo know its worth it. It may be worth looking at forum profiles again so thanks for the reminder, sometimes one can forget these things when your mind is so occupied. For quick wins, you may want to just do a search on Hubpages or Squidoo for relevant content and comment accordingly, I find that this works, you don’t have to be a user either, in most cases if your content is useful then the author ill approve it and you’ll get a backlink pretty quickly, especially if that page has some PR.
I think article marketing will be something that I will always have as part of my arsenal, I’ve done a few UAW runs in the last week or so and have noticed in increase in SERPS and earnings which I can only attribute to UAW and also regular updating of content (its cliche but its sooo true)…lol
Anyway, how are your earnings doing, any improvement? I’m quite keen to know how your authority site is doing!
Totally agree with Matt, visiting your site is like one of the things I do several times a day so keep up the posting.
Keep up the good work.
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Article Writers A Love Hate Relationship
Watch that title, man…
I recently start my site and was only going to use article submissions to the usual postrunner, ezine, goarticles and hubpages but I noticed you using commentluv and had a look into it.
I decided that I think I want my website to be more of a community site than an MFA and also noticed that using the commentluv search box gave me excellent blogs where I could leave comments.
Can you confirm that you need to be a member of commentluv for the comments to de ‘do’ follow?
When you fill in your forum profiles, are they in relevant niches too? Or do you make up profiles in any niche as long as they are public pages?
I must admit that I love the idea of forum profiles and comments on relevant blogs and forums working in my favour but it seems to be a grey area from what I have read. I for one will be upping my commenting to see what happens.
Colin Young recently posted..9 Cranberry Juice Benefits
Blog commenting and forum links are black hat if you use submitters – not grey. Done naturally they’re 100% whitehat (or else there would be no ability to leave a sig link or profile link in the first place).
Manually works tons. Haven’t hopped on sick yet though….
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Happy Cow And Gettin Cheesy Widdit
You wrote a very interesting article there Sara!
I found an interest in your article because I recently decided I wanted to buy a subscription to unique article wizard and while I read some articles about the service all said that is a great service and that the links will last for years. Some even said that blog commenting is good but the posts go into the archive and eventually you will lose all the link juice from that page after it will be a relic or the page will be deindexed.
Now I started to read your post and you ruled in favor of blog commenting and forum signature links. I am confused like hell right now, I think I need to do more research on this.
By the way, I can see you are steadily approching your goal in making $5k dollars a month I wish you look and will support you in anyway I can:P
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Although most webmaster believe no-follow links are useless, there has been several research around, and if I remember right, some folks from SeoBook have done a test by building a few thousands of sites with a common typo word that was not present in the target page and neither relevant.
It seems that no-follow links still pass some juice or at least help ranks with some keywords. I personally judge the whole concept of PR obsolete anyways, has I have encountered several domains that were fairly aged and some with literally hundreds of thousands of NATURAL backlinks amongst them enormous quantities of PR5= links to have pretty low PR.
I have still yet to comment using the “keyword” recent comments, but I have looked into it. I was actually even able to find sites for a niche that is very limited, so to speak-so that idea works pretty good, but it was not mine. I got the idea from Dave a while back he did a post on different back linking methods. I tried this using most of my keywords, and all of them gave me numerous choices.
I also wanted to check out the commentLuv-that seemed like a good choice too.
Have you considered using Article Marketing Robot instead of UAW, SEOLV, AR etc? Also have you done split tests between spinning and not spinning articles? I think you might be pleased to know that I’ve found spinning makes no difference for article directories (only spin if you are trying to rank multiple web 2.0 properties).
Keep up the good work, I’ve been following you for about 3 months now.
Sara doesn’t like article marketing – that’s the thing. She’s more like Michelle of PassiveIncomeOnlineBlog – but you know what….since you mention the whole “don’t spin” thing, I’ll take you up on the challenge and see how that works out.
That’s how I used to submit manually – and so long as you spin well, I don’t see the trouble…BUT if I could get the same links without spinning (haven’t tried) then that would be cool.
Funny I’ve never tried AMR without spinning…
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Happy Cow And Gettin Cheesy Widdit
Yea I ran around stupidly for a couple of weeks doing split testing on UAW network and the AMR. Result was canceling UAW and all of the other “networks.”
1. Spinning takes a lot of effort.
2. If you pay someone on oDesk to do it, they all use bestspinner and just end up making it less readable.
3. Writing articles for UAW takes a lot of effort and even more if you spin them.
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If you think about it, if you are just synonym spinning and not rewriting each paragraph and sentence completely then I think Google is smart enough to pick up on it and maybe they just think you are ripping off someone else’s article because they already have a different, but similar version indexed. Whereas if you dropped the same article, same author name, same author resource box Google would say hey, this must be important, it got syndicated to many websites like a “real” news story would. Then they can take the duplicates and put them in the supplementary index, and you still get credit for the links.
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We all know it doesn’t take very long to write a 500-600 word article, especially if you are using it for backlinks instead of traffic. Then you pop it into AMR and 300-500 contextual backlinks. Then you take something like BookmarkingDemon and Xrumer them each with 2-3 links for indexing instead of pinging.
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Then you can continue with your Scrapebox fun
I’ve had great results with ArticleRanks and UAW, but will definitely try this non-spin method (only because, well..why not?).
If it works, I owe you $670 and then some…monopoly money, I mean.
Seriously, it’s funny how I’ve NEVER dared to try that, I only tested my hand-submitted articles and saw that they don’t all wind up in the index, assuming it’s because of the dupe content.
So, you’re alleging you can get the same credit for those links even if they’re in the supplementals?
Here’s what I’m thinking (this is all off the cuff, this really is a pretty cool idea if it works):
Even if you submitted your original articles, well-written for traffic and links (pre-selling for an affiliate offer, for example, to a landing page or Amazon offer, etc.) – then you could, in theory, see some traffic from your more legible articles, esp. if they’re syndicated.
I’ll have to report back in a month after testing, but on paper it sounds like a “Why not?”
Hoping this turns out to be something that works like gangbusters. Whatever a gangbuster is…
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Happy Cow And Gettin Cheesy Widdit
Blog commenting is awesome. Unfortunately, most sites only like you linking to your homepage and won’t tolerate you linking to all your individual pages and your supporting sites. I like blog commenting for domain diversity.
As for nofollow…I have a blog comment from make money online with seo(that site’s no follow). It’s been sitting there for a long time and it always shows up on webmaster tools. Even if it doesn’t pass PR or keyword authority, it can still count for your unique domain statistics. And that’s what I like blog commenting for borging up the unique domain count.
Tyler Davis recently posted..Does smoking stunt growth
It’s just nice to have a mixture of backlinks. This way if one type of link gets devalued others will still be there to take it’s place.
Article Marketing +Fourm Profiles+Blog Commenting+Whatever else you can think of+Great Content = Success
Everything works, some stuff may work better then others. But as long as you make a plan and stick to it you will be ok.
Shaun recently posted..Making Money Blogging
I have scrapebox and sick submitter. Im not going to use the two software at the same time.
i’m considering using vps for one of the software.
and i think better put scrapebox in vps. because I can do nothing with my pc since scrapebox slow commenter is running.
please suggest me a good and not too expensive vps company that able to support scrapebox.
and this post inspire me to do more with sick and scrapebox.
thanks
pageblip recently posted..Angelina Jolie Working on a High End Jewelry Business
Blog commenting is a nice way to get traffic instead of backlinks.Instead of blog commenting forum and article postings gets you backlinks provided the URL of your website is added to your signature.If your blog is submitted to social bookmarking or networking sites such as DIGG or DELICIOUS which are cached by the Google spiders on a daily basis you might just get a backlink when Google updates PR and backlinks.
nice to see a good long detailed post on a full system of generating backlinks.
sicks not bad for profile backlinks but check out ignite seo for higher quality related links
It is important to find blogs related to your site and to leave comments that are both meaningful and relevant to the post. When you leave a comment, you are often able to leave a link to your site, thus creating a relevant SEO backlink.