So you’re out hunting for high pagerank, do follow blog comment link opportunities and you find one. The only problem is that judging by this blog, and judging by this blog post, you get the feeling you’ll never be able to leave an anchored link here. Damn! Too bad. Doesn’t that always suck? Yes, I’m sure we all agree that it’s a huge disappointment to find a PR6 blog post, which gives do follow links, and realizing that you’ll never be able to anchor your favorite anchor of the day. Most seo guys and gals out there would probably try to leave a nice comment and leave their real name as the anchored link. This is so the comment actually gets approved and at least you can bring some juice back to your site. What’s the problem with this?
The problem is that although you are getting a really nice PR6 link, it’s not going to help your site rank for its keywords at all. That’s the problem. We don’t look for high pagerank blog posts just for fun; we want to make more money, which will require more traffic, which is due to high rankings, which is why we need these links in the first place. You might be wondering just exactly what the effect would be on a site that just received a PR6 link. Not much is the answer. Yes, the site you are linking to would probably gain a significant amount of pagerank on the next update, but it’s rankings would stay the same – all else being equal. You probably get the feeling that there is a better way to take advantage of a nice, juicy PR6 link, and I would have to agree with you. There is a solution to this all too common predicament.
The solution is very simple and very, very effective. I never read about this technique, but I think it’s a good one. I call it funneling link juice. I will give you an example from my own personal experience. I found a site that allowed do follow links on its blog posts. The site was in the academic/journalism/community niche. (That’s a good tip, use it.) It was a really great opportunity to go mining for high PR links. I did a site: query in Goog and added the comment form footprint to it. I put the footprint in quotes. The footprint was, I think, “Post a reply” or something like that. (A footprint is a bit of text that is found on every comment page for a particular site. Some comment page footprints are: leave a comment, leave a reply, post a response…) You are with me right? Site:domain.com/example “leave a reply”
This query will grab pages from this site that have a comment field. Now I use SEO Quake to check the pagerank of all the links showing in the serps. Doing this I was able to bookmark over 40 PR5 and PR6 links, just from this one site! Oh, that brings another thing to mind. What do you do with 40 PR5 and PR6 links from one site? Most seo professionals know that getting 40 links from one site is just a little tiny bit better than getting one link from one site. It’s better to get 40 links from 40 different sites. This is another predicament that the funneling link juice technique solves.
So far you’ve learned that academic type sites, or sites that have academic content on them are good sources for high PR link mining. You’ve also learned how to search just that one site, in Goog, for ALL of the high PR pages it has. You’ve also learned how to use a footprint to find comment pages on said site. Imagine finding a site with 40 PR6 do follow link opportunities? This is what I did:
I knew this was a gold mine so I put some effort into this. I created 40 blogs on about 30 different platforms. I used blogspot, wordpress, blogetery, webs, weebly and so on. All of the common web2.0 properties out there. I used software to create the accounts but you could do this by hand. You could also do less than 40 blog. I created 40 blogs so that each blog could receive a nice fat link. The way pagerank works is basically like this: one PR6 link will give you enough juice to become a PR4 by the next update. That is commonly accepted PR theory. The link could be diluted though if there are lots of other links (outbound) on that PR6 page. But if there are very few links on a PR6 page, and yours is one of them, your site could be a PR4 on the next update. Figure then it takes two good PR6 links to earn yourself a PR4.
Okay, so all 40 blogs are set up with one introductory post on all of them. The content on the blogs can’t be spammy at all at this point. We need these blogs to look nice and clean until all comments are approved. Then we can change the content on the blogs to the relevant content that suits us. With all the blogs set up, and with all the blogs having at least one post, it’s time to start leaving comments at our target site. I simply went to the first PR6 page and left a long, thoughtful comment. I anchored my name and linked to the first of my new 40 blogs. Then, I changed proxies, cleared cookies and went back to the site to leave another comment. This time I left my name as the anchored link again, but linked to blog 2 of 40. Get the idea? I ended up visiting all the PR6 and PR5 pages and got links to all of my new blogs.
I did this over weeks and weeks of time. I didn’t want to spook the admin. My comments were approved. Most of the time when a blog admin approves a comment, he or she will first check out the visitors site to see if it’s cool or not. If it’s cool ie it’s not internet marketing, then they let the comment live. The end result is that I had 40 juiced up blogs, each with about the equivalent of a PR3 or PR4. Finally, I added content to each blog that was relevant to the money page/site I was promoting. The effect was dramatic of course. Why?Because each blog was sending my money site a perfect link. What is a perfect link you ask? A perfect link is a anchored links that features your main keyword, is do follow, comes from a page that is on topic with your money page, and the link is coming from the body content and not the sidebar or footer.
Each blog has some pagerank too. Did you know that pagerank updates all the time, but that the toolbar only updates a few times a year? So this means instant and dramatic increases in the serps should be expected if you try this technique. I hope you get the idea here. It’s better to have a pr3 anchored link from a page that is very topically relevant to your page, than it is to get a pr6 link from a page that is not relevant – and no anchored link.
Some might consider taking this to another level by creating a link wheel with these 40 juiced up blogs. I might try it. I’m not sure link wheels are doing what they used to anymore, but I do have a few friends in the industry who say otherwise. But I can’t repeat what they say as fact. I will only share techniques and knowledge that I have personal experience with.