Backlinks, SEO Gold
Backlinks are gold. If you are serious about search engine optimization for your blog or website, you will want to have as many of these nuggets out in the World Wild Web as possible. But how do you go about getting them?
First of all, some of you may be wondering what a backlink is. Simply put, it is a link from another site (preferably a high ranking site) to yours without you having to reciprocate. These types of links occur when someone references a post from your blog or adds you to their blogroll.
How do you build backlinks? Well, there is a lot of good information about building links of all sorts (including backlinks) in Caroline Middlebrook’s Blogger’s Bible series of free lessons for bloggers.
textlink.com
One technique that has recently come to my attention is a site called textlink.com. This site will provide you the opportunity to create backlinks in many different sites with the text and url of your choosing. There are thousands of sites to choose from and you can place your link in the sidebar, footer or even in the content of the articles. You can also create articles for the sites with up to 3 text links in them.
They are currently offering a 21 day trial with 25 free links. You keep the links permanently even if you don’t stick with the program. So, I decided to try it out and see what it’s all about. [I’ve also signed up for their affiliate program so the links to their site will have my affiliate id attached.]
One thing that is important to keep in mind: you don’t need a credit card for the trial. I’m not sure how things will transpire after the 21 days, but I’m sure you’ll need to enter some credit card information at that point.
After the Trial
Once the trial is over (or once you’ve used your 25 credits), you will continue on at $99/month and be assigned 99 credits. You can use more credits (paying $1 per credit) and the credits don’t expire if you don’t use them all up in a month. This seems a little steep for me right now, so I’ll have to see some real value before I start shelling out that much per month. But 99 new backlinks every month isn’t a bad deal either.
Every link you create stays forever even if you don’t continue on with the program. That’s a pretty good deal.
Impressions So Far
Once I registered (there was a minor hiccup in the registration but the account was created fine) I had 25 credits and 21 days to use them up. I created a link for one of my blogs that needs a little traffic and added 4 different links to it.
During that process (which was relatively simple although not as clear as I’d like) I noticed that some of the sites that they put links on are using adult keywords and descriptions — even though you’re not allowed to link to adult sites. It was a little disconcerting as I was looking for child or parenting oriented entertainment sites to put my link on. Using a filter to search for the sites rather than just category cleaned that up and showed more appropriate sites.
For each site that is shown you are given the option of putting your link on the home page (costs 3 credits) or a subpage (1 credit). By default, 3 subpages are shown for each but you can click show all subpages to see the rest if the site looks interesting.
The other thing that I noticed is that the sites in question seem to be canned sites — many had the same theme. The articles seem to be fairly well written but don’t contain a lot of links. I imagine that this is one of the reasons that they want people to write articles. Other articles are just compilations of Twitter tweets about a specific topic for a given month.
The actual links were put into a section on the sidebar called Resources. I used all sidebar links for this experiment, so I don’t know if it would be different for footer links.
Because the sites are fairly robotic, I’m not convinced that the backlinks will be as high quality as you’d get from a friend’s blog or website. It may be possible that these links may work against you down the road — Google and the other search engines don’t really like paid links and I’m not sure how they’ll view this setup. I wouldn’t rely on this technique for all your backlinks but it could be a good way to get things started.
The Affiliate Program
They also have an affiliate program. If someone signs up under your affiliate id, you will receive a share of the monthly $99 every month that they remain a member. Your cut is $50. Even if you opt out of the program yourself, your affiliate status will remain. They have some banners and text links that you can use (you can’t make your own).
One thing that I found with the links is that they are not xhtml which is what I prefer for my site. I modified the code accordingly. There was also an extra <P> tag with the link code which I removed (there was no closing </P> tag which is okay for html, but not xhtml).
Conclusions
I’m cautiously optimistic about this program. I will check it out over the next 20 days and see where it leads. If you’d like to try textlink.com for free don’t hesitate to use my affiliate link — it doesn’t cost you any extra and it helps a fellow blogger. What’s not to like about that 8=)
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Tags: backlinks, blogging, SEO, textlink.com
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User interface of TextLinks.com is so ugly! And there is no so many quality sites to make quality backlinks.