Boost your Backlink strength

So last week Matt Cutts decided to tell everyone that Pagerank sculpting and the use of nofollows to stop page rank leakage doesnt work.

Like many of us I've spent the last few days pondering over all the work I did to *stop* the flow of pagerank on my site only to have this bombshell dropped last week.

Then I thought of a way in which this might work to people's advantage.

I'll give you an example using an article site but this can be used on any site that allows you to submit content. In the past few months article sites haven't been passsing as much juice to external links but I wonder if this little trick might boost things a little!

Write your article as per normal and submit it to article site(s). For this to work, the article site must allow commenting.

Once approved your article (with a nice anchor text backlink to your site) will begin passing some juice - but not much.

Now find all the articles in that site that already have some juice - i.e. are reasonably old, have some backlinks, pr etc.

"keyword: site:articlesite.com

(with seoquake I believe you can organise these by PR)

Go to all the other articles and write some comments linking to the article you just wrote - try and use the anchor text you are gunning for when linking.

This will build a number of nofollow internal links to your article and hopefully -

You should get link juice from the pages that have it (based on matt's comments)
The site administrators wont care too much (since its internal and nofollow)
The strength of your anchor text will be boosted by having other similar anchor text links pointing to it.

Yeah I'm feeling a bit anti-Google for not letting that one out of the bag earlier - but no matter what changes Google makes there's always a way the seo can use it to their advantage.

hope this helps. thanks is appreciated.

Hey... Thanks for the great recommendation...
It just may work.. An hour worth of work won't kill anyone for trying it out right?

no worries.. yeah at the moment it's just an idea but I can't see why it wouldn't work - if it does it would make some of the easier ways of getting links a little more worthwhile.

Time will tell I guess.

If I understand correctly the new google way of managing nofollow, no juice will be passed to the article page you are linking to. The new thing is that juice will now be lost for the page where a nofollow link is on...

Before, a page with nofollow links would not lost any juice at all. Now, it will lost juice. But the linked pages from nofollow links still don't get any juice.

squelsh said:

So last week Matt Cutts decided to tell everyone that Pagerank sculpting and the use of nofollows to stop page rank leakage doesnt work.

Click to expand...

Do you have a link to this post? I cant seem to find it on his blog.

It definitely can and will work, it's very similar to doing different postings on blog comments from the same blog... if that make sense.

Just make sure they are do follow

Great article.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the comments so far.

First of all I would recommend reading this article on how Google does now follow the nofollow link internally. Nothing has been said about externally yet, so that's another question.

Realign02: You are right in saying it will work if it is ******** - my idea is that since internal nofollow links are now ******** will they not now pass link juice? (BTW if you find sites that have ******** links in the commenting use them as well, as Realign02 says it's bound to work here).

Tata668: From what I understand, particularly from what has been said on Seomoz -

Before if you had five links and nofollowed one of them, the remaining four would get all the link juice. Now Google has revealed that it treats nofollows and dofollows the same (if internal) - so adding a nofollow link to another page i.e. commenting and linking to a page on the site (usually these are nofollowed) will pass link juice to that page.

Do these with the strongest pages on a site/ or the best pages that are already ranking for your desired term and you will boost the quality of the page you have linking to your site.

Wow! That's starting to get confusing but I hope it makes a little more sense now!

squelsh said:

Now Google has revealed that it treats nofollows and dofollows the same (if internal) - so adding a nofollow link to another page i.e. commenting and linking to a page on the site (usually these are nofollowed) will pass link juice to that page.

Click to expand...

Where do you see that now nofollow links will pass juice to internal pages?

I quote an analogy from the seomoz article:

In the past, the unblocked videos got more authority money and the blocked ones got none. Now, the unblocked videos still get authority money ? just not as much ? and the blocked ones still get none.

Click to expand...

Before, when there was a nofollow link on a page, its juice-it-would-have-passed-if-it-was-not-a-nofollow was distributed to the other links on the page. Now, its juice-it-would-have-passed-if-it-was-not-a-nofollow is lost, it's not distributed to the other links. But the pages linked by nofollow links STILL don't get any juice.

This is what I understand.

Hi guys,

Here is one of the original articles on the subject.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow

I will hopefully be able to run a test on this during the week, although it might take a while for the results to be visible. As soon as they are I will post them on here - will also try and post some of the other articles relating to this.

I haven't read all the post , just the first one then skimmed through the rest. What you said works and is actually done very often. This method of getting backlinks to your backlinks is actually a very safe way to do seo. It's like transforming your strongest backlinks into feeder sites. It is used primarily by very large and important sites where seo is done very carefully. It is a way to keep your site super whitehat. To protect it from what the search engines might consider as spamming or blackhatseo.

You could add to comments any other backlinking method that you know. Articles with anchor text pointing at the backlinks , social bookmarking your backlinks, forum signatures with backlinks in it, etc. You get the idea.

squelsh, don't you understand my last comment? Read the article again!

Your method doesn't work if it involves nofollow links. Or maybe it works, but not because of the new nofollow handling changes by google! Nofollow links STILL don't pass juice from what google says. RTFA!

point taken tata668. I will post some sites that have ******** commenting in the next few days.

It is my understaning that page rank is still not passed on no follow links. It now just "evaporates"

Thanks for posting this squelsh. Article steroids method uses same tactic except you use platforms w/ PR that have do follow links and keyword user names for making comments.

You can find the article steroids videos here on BHW. From what I remember, you need SEO quake and can use Clearblogs, EZA, Hubpages (do follow if your author score is 75 or above or your hub score is 40 or above), Multiply, Propeller, Squidoo & Youtube (have to rate vids to pass on PR w/do follow links).

Here's the link to the Article Steroids thread:

Xray, thanks this looks promising! Saves me a lot of time.

Well if you can't strengthen the quality of the backlinks pointing to your site you can reduce the quality of the backlinks pointing to competitors sites?

I.e. if a competitor has links from a blog - post lots of comments on the page that the link is on. Using a number of different URLs, usernames and possibly i.p.s they should all get accepted.

This will then reduce the quality of any ******** links on the page. am i right?

quality indexed ^^

I think Google's full of sh!t.... Pretty sure that Matt Cutt's is just bitching about our uber l33t black hat techniques and he can't find a way to stop us. Long live BHW!

Think about this the millions of blogs using nofollow and everything else... if Google let's up on nofollow it would completely compromise their index and allow spammers to gain rank over all legitimate sites. They would also start indexing pages like TOS, Privacy Policy that we normlly tag as nofollow... In essence a change like this if it were to happen would turn their index to sh!t instantaneously. Not to mention, think of all the infinite loops pages, honey pots, etc.

I mean seriously, do you guys want to see TOS pages and Privacy Policies when your looking for a place to goto dinner with your girl? or maybe that new Ferrari your going to buy with all your black hat cash.... How pissed would you be if all you could find was the TOS page about Ferrari?

Once again... I do think Google is making some changes to prevent sculpting yes but, are they over hyping things... I thinks so.