You might be expecting to get let down by such a spamtastic blog post title but I will really show you how to get thousands (actually unlimited) links from a PR9 domain. However this post isn’t really about a stupid link trick, it’s about the inherent flaws in all types of quantitative link data research. But you’re probably not going to read down that far anyway so don’t worry!
Sweet links dude!
At a panel we did for the DPA conference yesterday I mentioned it was possible to get dofollow links from Facebook pages or profiles. This has been possible for a fair while using numerous Facebook apps but as soon as slightly backdoor tactics to get links from prominent sites start getting talked about at conferences or showing up on Seomoz you know they’re not going to last long anyway. We’ve seen this lately with Twitter closing out dofollow links through applications and more recently Dave Naylor’s Flickr comment trick getting ‘fixed’
So here’s what you need to do to get your 50,000 free links:
- Get yourself a new Facebook page here
- Install the HTML profile box app Static FBML app
- Add a block of links to the html box using your anchor text. You can deep link to as many pages as you like here, for the sake of argument lets say you add 25 links (you could link to as many sites as you want here not just pages within the same site)
- Now all you need to do is create lots and lots of Facebook pages for Google to crawl, don’t worry you don’t have to create new business pages for each one because Google’s going to crawl every wall post (status update) you make as a new page, just check out the index for the coke facebook page . Go ahead and plug each of your keywords into your status box one by one.
- To create an individual page for each status update you’ll then need to leave a comment on your own status update, here’s what that might look like:
- The cool thing about this is not only do you get lots of pages, the page title of each page you create will use the keywords you put into your status message.
- Now go ahead and repeat this page creation process as many times as you like. For each status update page you create you’re actually creating however many links you added to your sidebar in step 3. So if you added 25 links then do 500 status updates you’ve created 12,500 dofollow inbound links, not bad for an hours work right?
- But wait the fun doesn’t stop there, because Facebook can translate your page into 67 languages and duplicate your pages (and links) across stacks of subdomains like http://uk-ua.facebook.com/cocacola?v=feed&story_fbid=126800933305, your pages are going to self replicate and before you know it your 12,500 links are going to become 50,000+.
Now once that page gets indexed you’ll have 25 dofollow links, great but how do I get 50,000 I hear you cry!
Your links will be placed on awesome contextually relevant pages like this:-)
Unique, keyword rich page titles on all your linking pages
I know what you’re thinking, Google ain’t going to count all these links are they?
Well yes and no…
In the sense of rankings, PageRank, authority or anything that actually matters – no these links probably won’t help your site.
But in the sense that Google will report the links in webmaster tools and they’ll probably also show up in public data sources like YSE and Majestic or whatever yard stick you use to gage your link popularity your data is going to be skewed. Yes they do ‘count’
All these facebook links will show up in webmaster tools
On a practical level you could use a technique like this to hide your link data and make it harder for competitors to drill into your backlinks and find your most valuable links. This should also help lead your rivals down the wrong path with their own link building-
“Holy crap yourdomain.com has got 100,000 backlinks, we’re going to need 200,000 backlinks and fast. Where’s the number for that Indian directory submission company”
Now for the serious stuff
You probably shouldn’t use the technique described above. The most likely result is Facebook will delete your page and block your account within hours if you try. But these exploits are all around. Virtually any UGC site can be hacked around with to create links, blog platforms like wordpress.com and blogspot being the most obvious and often exploited examples.
With raw link data being so easy to manipulate my question is what value do link measurement tools really have?
Think about the ways you might use quantitative data to asses the quality of a page when doing link research.
PageRank – Can be brought, faked or cyphened off link networks with little or no skill involved. Soon to be redundant?
Inbound links – Really easy to manipulate i.e. the Facebook example above
Linking domain diversity – Easy to fake by hosting your content over subdomains
Linking root domains – Better, but still easy to manipulate with low quality bulk link building (bulk link directories, automated link exchange, cheap paid links, comment spam etc)
Bespoke link measurement tools i.e. linkscape – Essentially flawed by virtue of the fact they really just composite the above data.
The point I’m getting at is that knowing a site has a PR7, 50,000 backlinks, MozRank whatever is worth nothing without the most valuable tool in your link building arsenal – human beings.
The SEO industry has tried and failed for years to make link building easy, and most link quality measurements are geared up to support this construct. To a link research tool the types of links you get through a program like inlinks look amazing. High PR, lots of linking domains, dofollow, in-content. Its only when you visit the blog for yourself and discover its a garbage paid link in a blog post which has be written by an article spinner that you see its true value- the quantitative data lied to you.
To get good links which stand the test of time you need awesome content, powerful PR, real world business relationships and time sucking, manual link research and outreach work. Quantitative data can help you work more efficiently but measuring the success or strength of your site in terms of any link based metric is only going to give you half the story.
How do you measure the strength of your backlink profile?
Related posts:
- What snowballs can teach us about free advertising with Facebook Pages
- Google offer free training courses for all experience levels until 23rd July
- How To Use Link Requests To Sell Your Product As Well As Build Links
- Beyond the Usual Suspects – 5 Keyword Research Tools You Might Never Have Heard Of
- Google ‘Jump to’ Links Getting Confused by AJAX?
John McElborough is a digital marketing consultant at SiteVisibility. He writes mostly about search engine optimisation, usability, Facebook and fish. You can connect with him on linked in here http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmcelborough, twitter http://twitter.com/johnmcelborough or read more of his blog posts here http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/author/john/
#1 by Bogdan at October 23rd, 2009
It’s not working for me. I’m using the app, try to post the message but nothing appears.
Doesn’t work now?
#2 by john at October 23rd, 2009
What isn’t working? Adding the links?
#3 by Bogdan at October 23rd, 2009
Yes, that. Nothing shows up. How do you add an app to the page, not your profile?
#4 by keesjan SEOEffect at October 23rd, 2009
Great post John,
so a linkmonitor tool must indeed also measure the quality of a link. As a human thats possible. But what data do you think of the automaize that proces? the 50.000 facebook links can be tracked because its linkgain in a short term of time from the same domain. So i think it can be tackled by majesticseo?
#5 by John at October 23rd, 2009
thanks Keesjan
I’d say majestic is the best tool for link data at the moment and yes in this case it would be easy to filter out all the links from facebook. I guess the point I was getting at was that all link data can be manipulated, including majestics, so if you just look at data and never qualitative stuff like the readership of the sites where you get links, you might blind yourself with numbers
#6 by John at October 23rd, 2009
Try this app instead Bogdan http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878
#7 by Ed @ The Quick Press at October 23rd, 2009
I just have to laugh! This is a great article, as well as a great example of how people are so link hungry that they will try almost any shortcut to make it happen. The first comments are people who can’t make the shortcut work!
Great content, like this, will bring about the links. If people spent as much time on content development and promotion as they do on backlink tricks, they’d probably own the keywords they are seeking.
#8 by John at October 23rd, 2009
@Ed thanks, yes that was the point I was trying to get at!
#9 by Kelvin at October 23rd, 2009
Yeah anyone who uses this as a serious tactic is a little loopy, besides once you get more than a dozen links from a domain you’re not going to see much value from having any more
#10 by Dixon Jones at October 24th, 2009
Nicely written, John. The very last line is the real question… How can we measure the strength of our backlink profiles? We have mist of the tools now, but tools alone won’t get us there. I see “back link strenght” as the online equivalent of “brand value” offline. In theory we can make maps, but Google engineers describe those numerous holes as “bugs”. When they fix the bugs, it’s hard to tell algorithmically that anything is different.
With a human eye, it’s not so hard to tell what should or should not be right though.
Dixon.
Nice article.
#11 by esm at October 24th, 2009
“time sucking, manual link research”!!! thank you!.
sick of hearing the new short cut about measuring link strength, its way off every time. you always need to manually double check, so you can spot things like the facebook example.
SEO is not something that can be fully automated, that is what a lot of people forget.
#12 by Available Domain Names at October 24th, 2009
Strategies for link building… another creative one.
#13 by Article kid at October 25th, 2009
cool great information
#14 by Alok at October 28th, 2009
Now as the technique is out, it will be fixed soon. But it is still a good way to hide link profile.
#15 by Shiju Alex at October 28th, 2009
Nice article John.
One thing we should consider is that Google advices linkbuilding. They say it like ‘you shall do it, but you should not do it’.
Natural is the best, even for links. But when it becomes a race, some people would try to use steroids and get caught. And then, some would think of inventing steroids which will pass the tests. And then, the authorities would think of implementing new tests, which will find those new drugs.
#16 by Mark at October 28th, 2009
Nice tricks. I’ll try facebook trick and hoping to get thousands of links
#17 by Timbo at October 28th, 2009
Nice post. However the human eye will never be a significant part of the process as google now has over one trillion pages indexed. Even trying to handle spam complaints turns out to be done on a priority basis which means most of the complaints will never be dealt with simply because data of this magnitude can not be processed manually.
#18 by mohamed hagag at October 30th, 2009
Nice post. However the human eye will never be a significant part of the process as google now has over one trillion pages indexed. Even trying to handle spam complaints turns out to be done on a priority basis which means most of the complaints will never be dealt with simply because data of this magnitude can not be processed manual
#19 by Linux Guy at October 30th, 2009
This is a very risky aproach. It may cause problems with Google and the other search engines. I would not recommend it.
#20 by Ruben Zevallos Jr. at October 31st, 2009
I´m trying to do it, but I did not see my HTML info.
#21 by Gudang Hikmah at November 2nd, 2009
thanks for your sharing, new informations for me
#22 by Kean Miguel, ATT Uverse Reviews at November 8th, 2009
This is really a great article, I will try it for sure..I hope the second link is already working.
#23 by Flor at November 11th, 2009
A techer once gave our class a really long exam, it took forever to answer, we all failed. The instructions said write your name and hand it in. On the top of the page you write: “this post isn’t really about a stupid link trick, it’s about the inherent flaws in all types of quantitative link data research. But you’re probably not going to read down that far anyway so don’t worry!” BUT I tried to get the links FIRST without reading to the bottom of the page…you´re right there´s no way but hatd work, thnks for the lesson.
#24 by Reality PPC at December 2nd, 2009
This is no long term strategy.. kinda cool if you needed to get moved up the search engines on an very easy keyword or phrase.. and would be kinda fun to freak out your others… you could get million links in a week..:)
#25 by kathleen at January 23rd, 2010
Do you know Face Book is a no follow now.
#26 by Tom Nash at February 5th, 2010
Although your arguments (with relation to measuring link numbers) may have weight, I think they are undermined by good seo practise.
Granted anyone could go and collect hundreds of low quality links from hundreds of low quality sites using (blackhat-ish) methods, but any business serious about SEO and their reputation would not conduct such practises unless ill-advised.
It is regarded that within highly competitive SERPs: “building many low quality links offer little to no value compared to fewer high-authority ones”.
For this reason it is likely that your theories only apply to naturally spammy markets or for terms with relatively low competition (in which low quality links could earn a 1st ranking).
To rank in a competitive market you need great numbers of good quality links and this will be reflected by link analysis tools. Foolish SEOs would tarnish that landscape with spammy links.