What works and what doesn’t work in getting inbound links that make a difference? There is a lot of discussion about this in SEO circles on what is the best methods to use.
For a long time, and some still swear by it, that it was send out comments to blogs with links back to your site. This works remarkably well, however there is a drawback to degradation. You eventually loose your links so unless your always making hundreds of them a day eventually your fighting a loosing battle.
The next big thing was to get into the social networks. Many of them allow you to create links or put things in your about me that contains a link back to your site. Theory being google crawls the profile and sees the link. There is lots of evidence that this works remarkably well. I can stand as proof that links like this do work. I pulled my coffee site up using a number of links like this.
Video submissions is another sought after source of links. Usually when you post a video you get to put up a an about this video where you can put links or you create a profile and get links. I find this to still be remarkably effective in getting links.
You can create articles and with spinning services or your own hard work you can send them out to the various Web 2.0 sites that allow you to post blogs and articles like Ezines and the like. There seems to be little being followed in this area unless your article gets posted to one of the big sites. There is value in that no doubt the blogs are being indexed (and hopefully with the caffeine update to google more so) that this is worthy of doing.
What seems to be the next step or the next big thing that the Big G is gonna pay attention to? There is one thing that I have noticed a very real trend in and that is Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking is where you set up an account with one of the hundreds of services out there. It allows you to create a list of links to sites you like and even leave comments so that when your not at your computer you can access them from someplace else. Remarkably stupid concept yet I am finding that it is much more powerful than I first thought.
I say that I think it is much more powerful is that I have been researching this since before the announcement about Caffeine and the buzz about what google is going to be watched to index faster. I looked at Alexa for my coffee site. I looked at Site Explorer for my coffee site, I looked at google webmaster tools for my coffee site. I started to look at what each was saying I had in the way of backlinks. Understanding that each is not telling me everything but each is giving me a piece of the picture of what they think means something to them. I quickly began to notice a recurring theme in all of them. Backlinks from Mixx (a social bookmark site), links from Digg, Links from all kinds of places I had been bookmarking in the past couple of months with friends and software.
Thinking about these bits of information and thinking how google might think something is important and currently hot, and of interest by a large number of people I thought where better to gather that data than from sites that are providing that service? The Social Bookmarking network sites.
These sites are ever changing, people are constantly adding new sites, bookmarking sites for friends, bookmarking what THEY THINK is important and interesting enough to want to pass around or keep track of. Well what is important to users of the internet is important to google to determine real time, relevant search results.
I think given what I have heard about the upcoming Caffeine update to Google, what I am seeing with regard to my own sites and their links, rank and position in search results I can say that parts of Caffeine are being employed now and that part of the update is to look more and more at these kinds of sites for relevant information.
Sparky