I’ll be dedicating a few posts to grabbing questions in the Open Questions post.

There were several questions like it, but I think this one represents it the best.

From Matthew

Hi Eli,

I’ve read through your blog and its amazing info. Thanks. I have a question. I’ve read through and I find the link building stuff (black hole SEO) a bit too complex, could you suggest any other effective link building techniques? I’ve heard great stuff about TNX.net.

Thanks!

I haven’t heard of TNX, but here’s a really simple one most haven’t thought of. Much like ugly girls tend to have better personalities pretty and clean sites tend to be harder to link build, or at least take more effort initially. So a little technique I’ve been using a lot lately is to build sites that gather links really easy. A quick easy way to do this is to build a site that distributes something people want to either put on their websites or social site profiles (ie. myspace, facebook, youtube and such). I’ll give you the most basic of examples. In a really old post on this blog I put up this picture:

Since then everyone and their dog has been hotlinking to it, especially since it’ll often times show up in Google images for the term Middle Finger. Not that I care but it illustrates the stupid shit people spread and its effectiveness can be used for links as minuscule as it is. So lets say all I had in my arsenal was this stupid picture of a flaming middle finger. I post it up on some site get it in google images and such just like i did. Then under it I put a textbox that says something like Put this on your ____ copy past etc etc. The code has a link to a random domain of mine, the domain doesn’t even have to be active, or it can be a money site. Who really cares? After awhile the flaming finger image gathers enough links to that domain that i just 301 redirect the domain over (doesn’t even have to be an entire domain as I’ll mention below). All the links goes to my new pretty site.

This is a really weak example I realize, but it can be done with just about any media (video, image, flash, etc.) you’d like. It can be done with any type of site you’d like. As long as its the type that tends to be able to gather links faster than your other type of site. If I got big pretty sites coming out on a future date i can build several of these site and by the time the main site goes live I can have plenty of link volume to rank properly. The only reason why this extra work is necessary is because viral link building tends to be exponential. In other words you got to have links to get rankings and got to have rankings to have links. More links means more links. So it creates a nice little shove on a boat too big to leave the dock on its own. Best of all its really easy and rarely costs anything at all to do.

If you’re wondering why this all kind of sounds familiar or like you should already know it, its because its a creative spin on two of the more popular techniques on this blog, Link Laundering Sites, and Cycle Sites. On a side note I’ve found that this also works on subdirectories. So you can create a site that distributes media or allows people to upload their own and it has em all on a separate subdirectory or page, the links can even go to the same page the item is on. Once each subdirectory or subpage gets enough links to it, cycle it out and let the links go to a site that needs em. You can also put the media up on another subdirectory to be used again in gathering more links. :) The best advice I can give you on this is to look for types of sites that gain links quickly right out of the gate. They may not make a lot of money, they may be high bandwidth, it doesn’t matter if they’re all temporary. You can still steal the idea to do some easy link building on the harder sites.

More answers coming soon