A Better Way To Get Backlinks
May 16th, 2007 by hbondEvery website owner at one time or another has received at least one link exchange request if not hundreds of them. Many of the link exchange requests are very poorly written and we discard them immediately. Once in a while though I get a really well written one in my inbox. I received one like this today. I won’t mention who it was from, or what site they were promoting because that’s not the point. I will however use this as an example of how not to develop backlinks.
In this case the link exchange request was well written and to the point. As expected I performed my diligence on the company and the person requesting the exchange. In the process of doing so I ran a few searches in the major search engines on the persons name + the name of the company they were promoting.
I was not surprised when I found plenty of backlinks on blogs from this person about the site they were promoting. So, I clicked through to a few and read the postings. What I found was blog spam. The comments were consistently the same and simply pointed the user to a URL back to the site they were promoting. Time and again I saw the exact same spammy post.
Most of these comments will get removed as spam so these kinds of backlinks are not worth the effort expended to create them.
The right way to do this is to provide meaningful content that a reader of the blog in question will derive value from. In the process make reference to the site your promoting only when it makes sense to do so. In other words if the your site has content relevant to the blog posting your commenting on. This same principle applies to comments in forums. Provide meaningful content and people will be drawn to your site to find out more.
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I totally agree, relevancy is of prime importance, whatever the tool you’re using for backlinks, i.e. blogs or forums etc. Even if you’re palnning a contextual link building campaign, go for the blogs related to your product/service/site. And this relevancy is much admired by search engine bots as well.
Hey BlogOxide – you’re right – it’s just the better way to do it for the user, and for SEO.
I totally agree with your kind of opinion – like BlogOxide said – it is very important to increase your relevancy. If your anchor text doesn’t fit your bussiness, it is highly recommend to change that, to utilize it as best as you can.
I am surprised a sloppy blog spammer would take time to write an exchange request. Seems like they would have to write 50 of them to get 1 which is a lot of work compared to firing away non insightful comments on blogs. Even if the 50 is the same message, having to find the info and make the send for such a poor ROI seems silly.
Could be just someone who does not know any better. Hopefully you were able to take some time to challenge and encourage them.