TheSoloAct
Junior Member
- May 12, 2019
- 159
- 154
I'm sure a lot of you know this or similar techniques, but just in case you're new and want some good white hat manual backlinks and are finding it difficult to find sites to make links on or guest post on, here's a quick guide that uses Moz.
If you don't have Moz premium, use the free trial for this exercise. For me, I just stick to changing my IP and doing another bunch of searches because I only really need this data once.
Open Moz's domain authority analysis tool (link) and enter competitors. They can be the biggest competitors or ones easier to tackle.
Scroll down and find the section that shows "search competitors". Also check the "top linking domains". Out of this pool of 10 sites per domain you analyze, you're bound to find forums and content websites. Chances are, you can either guest post on them or just drop a helpful message.
Here's how I do it. Suppose I find an Xbox forum (I have a gaming niche right now). I write an article that solves a very particular problem that a lot of people have mentioned on said side. Doesn't matter whether they already have a solution there. Make a post and link to your article.
If neither (guest posting or normal posts) are an option, a lot of sites have Disqus comment system which allows you to embed links (ideally Disqus is considered a better, cleaner social system as compared to basic/WordPress comments). Now, different sites have different levels of moderation, and these links are nofollow (but nofollow links are also important, and Google crawls them anyway). If you manage to be a part of a discussion, while also linking to a relevant article, it's gold.
Usually I do this process after creating a bunch of new content that's relevant to each site, but everyone might not have that amount of time or patience, so only target the top ones.
I can't begin to explain how much authority I've built (it helps to have an aged domain yourself) using this fairly easy but time-consuming (but 100% white hat) technique.
One thing people start to believe quickly is that they know almost every useful forum or site related to their niche. Once you do this exercise, you'll likely find a lot more websites that are worth your time. Sometimes you'll be able to find sites that are not directly related to your niche (like in my case, I got one that was about video cards - a major part of gaming) but with a very high DA.
Said site had a Disqus system (not the most preferred, you ideally want to go with forums that have ******** links) that had 500-600 comments from angry Nvidia lovers per post, and all I did was make something out of these discussions, put my own two bits of opinion, and add a link to a new article that was SUPER-RELEVANT (essentially, I created an article on what these guys were debating on). Traffic and backlink assured.
If you give this method enough time, over the course of a month or so, you'll see a good swing in your rankings.
Disclaimer: Things differ niche to niche. For many niches it might be difficult to find reliable forums and sites. And for others, it might be hard getting a link in due to moderation issues. But overall, if you make relevant content on problems and provide value, you can make a lot of backlinks, and not to mention these pieces of content are actually solutions to big problems, so others might also link and share.
If you don't have Moz premium, use the free trial for this exercise. For me, I just stick to changing my IP and doing another bunch of searches because I only really need this data once.
Open Moz's domain authority analysis tool (link) and enter competitors. They can be the biggest competitors or ones easier to tackle.
Scroll down and find the section that shows "search competitors". Also check the "top linking domains". Out of this pool of 10 sites per domain you analyze, you're bound to find forums and content websites. Chances are, you can either guest post on them or just drop a helpful message.
Here's how I do it. Suppose I find an Xbox forum (I have a gaming niche right now). I write an article that solves a very particular problem that a lot of people have mentioned on said side. Doesn't matter whether they already have a solution there. Make a post and link to your article.
If neither (guest posting or normal posts) are an option, a lot of sites have Disqus comment system which allows you to embed links (ideally Disqus is considered a better, cleaner social system as compared to basic/WordPress comments). Now, different sites have different levels of moderation, and these links are nofollow (but nofollow links are also important, and Google crawls them anyway). If you manage to be a part of a discussion, while also linking to a relevant article, it's gold.
Usually I do this process after creating a bunch of new content that's relevant to each site, but everyone might not have that amount of time or patience, so only target the top ones.
I can't begin to explain how much authority I've built (it helps to have an aged domain yourself) using this fairly easy but time-consuming (but 100% white hat) technique.
One thing people start to believe quickly is that they know almost every useful forum or site related to their niche. Once you do this exercise, you'll likely find a lot more websites that are worth your time. Sometimes you'll be able to find sites that are not directly related to your niche (like in my case, I got one that was about video cards - a major part of gaming) but with a very high DA.
Said site had a Disqus system (not the most preferred, you ideally want to go with forums that have ******** links) that had 500-600 comments from angry Nvidia lovers per post, and all I did was make something out of these discussions, put my own two bits of opinion, and add a link to a new article that was SUPER-RELEVANT (essentially, I created an article on what these guys were debating on). Traffic and backlink assured.
If you give this method enough time, over the course of a month or so, you'll see a good swing in your rankings.
Disclaimer: Things differ niche to niche. For many niches it might be difficult to find reliable forums and sites. And for others, it might be hard getting a link in due to moderation issues. But overall, if you make relevant content on problems and provide value, you can make a lot of backlinks, and not to mention these pieces of content are actually solutions to big problems, so others might also link and share.
