Posted on by Jay Shaffstall

Backlinks to Online Opportunity

Well, Google has finally decided to admit that there are links to Online Opportunity, at least inside of their Webmaster Tools area.

I’d been annoyed at Google’s insistence that there were no links, when I knew very well that my link building efforts were moving steadily forward. Apparently Google doesn’t want to provide anyone with any reliable information on the number of backlinks a site has, just in case you can use that to reverse engineer their algorithm.

I’ve been building links through a variety of ways.

Directory submissions have been ongoing, half a dozen every couple of weeks. I add these slowly, because a quick jump in directory submissions tends to lower your search engine rankings rather than raise it. You can see my Directory Maximizer review for details of the service I use to make directory submissions. Since they have a 35 submission minimum, I submit to a range of sites I own, half a dozen directories for each site.

I’ve bought a few links here and there, for PR purposes, but those only early on and none lately. I’ve been meaning to find a few likely sites to purchase a link on to improve my search engine rankings, but haven’t done so yet. Suitable sites would be closely related to the topic of the blog, and have a page in place already with suitable anchor text. And, of course, be willing to sell a link in the body of the article.

A few Ezine articles have provided some backlinks to the main page of the blog, and some deep links to specific posts. I want to do more of this, and get articles distributed farther than just Ezine Articles.

I’ve also posted links in forums that use follow links, using my signature to get links to the main page of the blog. And of course various posts have been linked to from other blogs.

And, of course, every contest generally has a reward in it for linking to the site and the contest page. Every little bit helps.

As a result of the link building efforts, I rank in the top 3 for the keyword “online opportunity” without the quotes (with the quotes I’m #1, which is to be expected). The two other contenders are older sites, one a .gov and one a directory that requires backlinks to it. The exact position of the top 3 shifts over time as Google weights one or the other more highly.

For a three month old blog, I’m pretty happy with that. The blog doesn’t even rate for “make money online” yet, but I haven’t put much effort into link building for that keyword yet. Any sort of review scheme on that keyword will have to wait until the next PR update, since most blogs don’t value backlinks from blogs with lower PR than themselves (which I think is a mistake, but that’s a topic for another post).

Do you have any favorite link building schemes I’ve missed?

14 Replies to “Backlinks to Online Opportunity”

  2. Google would be happier if everyone relied on organic backlinks, but these days I think it’s hard to compete if you don’t do some sort of deliberate link development (since most other people are, too).

  3. I’m so glad you posted about this!

    With the exception of participation in a couple of group writing contests, all of my backlinks are ‘organic’. According to Google, I have ZERO links. I’m two months old as a blogger. I have submitted my site to Google (although I have yet to set up a site map.)

    Maybe three months is the ‘sandbox’ I’ve read about? If so, congratulations on Online Opportunity’s graduation from the sandbox!

  4. [quote post=”264″]Maybe three months is the ’sandbox’ I’ve read about? If so, congratulations on Online Opportunity’s graduation from the sandbox![/quote]

    Thanks! That could very well be, that Google won’t report backlinks for a certain amount of time.

  5. Pingback: BackLinks until the Cows Come Home

  6. Hey Jay,
    What perfect timing for this post! I actually have a link building post that I made today. Its basically building a chain and I have already seen 5 link backs in the day. It may be good to be a part of this. If you agree, ill add you to my list! 🙂

  7. Tyson added me to the chain over at Some Make Money, so I’ll add on from there.

    Oh, and I wrote my 8 interesting things post today. It’ll show up tomorrow morning.

  9. Enkay, Jay, Juggling Frogs, and others reading these comments –

    Chris G is doing a round up of Flagship Post and then publishing it on his blog.

    Links to content not whole blogs, please. Only submissions sent via the submission form will be accepted. Not all submissions will make it to the final roundup. No hate posts and only safe for work content will be allowed.

    This looks like a fantastic opportunity to get a link from PR5 blog with a lot of readers. You should check it out.

    I submitted my Case Study of John Chow dot Com blog post.

    He is taking submission until next Tuesday PM.

    Tyson

  13. [quote post=”264″]I came, I saw, I entered. But, alas, I was not included[/quote]

    Mine wasn’t included, either. I submitted my Inbox Dollars guide, which currently accounts for 10% of the traffic to the blog (the home page only accounting for about 20%). In retrospect, I should have probably gone with my JustFree.com series (at about 5%), since that’s less commercial looking.

  14. Google is kind of funny. I had one blog that I didn’t hardly work on at bloggerparty. com, which ranged no.3 and then another one, which I have at blogspot, that has a no.1 page rank. The one blogspot has been running for a while and I have worked hard to get that blog known. it also has a lot of backlinks and traffic to it. I don’t know why this is but I would think that Google would have picked up on this one before it did bloggerpart. Go figure.

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