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Wikis, Blogs and Forums

Wikis, user editable websites, can be another rich vein to tap for inbound-links. They often have good PageRank but avoid spamming them, only link where you have good, relevant content. Some SEO Experts also suggest contributing to forums, newsgroups and blog comments. The value of incoming links is often negligible (especially for 'signature' urls and they usually represent less worth than the effort to write a post. They can generate click-thoughs and get your website better known in the community. Remember that the rules of the forum or blog should also be respected unless you want to get a bad reputation and suffer possible repercussions. If your site has valuable content search out any on-line FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on the subject and suggest a link to the FAQ maintainer.

Another technique for generating inbound-link is to provide some useful tool or service that can be integrated into other sites. An obvious example is a piece of Web software or tool that has a link back to your site. This is how many producers of Blog software have such great PageRanks. Web Services are an ideal way of making information available to third parties.

A lot of eCommerce sites generate traffic and a significant number of inbound-links through affiliate programs. These give a percentage of each sale or lead your website in return for promoting your products. The eCommerce site will normally use an external company to manage their affiliate program. Inbound-links contain special codes that tell the affiliate manager where the traffic is coming from. The Google Adwords program can also be used with some success to generate traffic from sites with content relevant to the target keywords.

Wiki Sandbox Spam

Many Wikis provide a sandbox which allows users to test edits and otherwise experiment with the Wiki. Where the sandbox is indexed by search engines (ie not excluded by a robots.txt file) it can be used as a source of inbound-links. Needless to say Wiki owners are not keen on this sort of spamming.

Buying Links

Because inbound-links are such a key feature of many search engines' ranking methodology schemes that artificially and unnaturally boost the number of such links are a target for penalty and possible bans. Buying links from highly ranked sites is particularly frowned upon. Often these sites spread their PageRank over so many links they represent little value to the purchaser.

Wikis, Blogs and Forums

Wiki Sandbox Spam

Buying Links

See Also