A Good Problem to Have?
Few things are more frustrating than getting a great link from a blog that is clearly not set up to stay indexed. They have dates all over the place, duplicate content in categories, feed pages, archive pages, no sitemap, links funneling every-which-way except to the actual post page… A few weeks later there are new entries on the blog’s home page and that post you got a link from is supplemental – or not indexed at all. Even if you get a link from someone’s MyYahoo page, what are the chances that it has any real link popularity to pass on?
Work Smart – Not Hard
Getting good links is difficult work, but it is rewarding and you should continue to do it. However, ensuring that the links you DO get stay indexed and have a bit of link juice to pass on is much easier. It’s like the old marketing mantra about how difficult and expensive it is to get new customers VS keeping the ones you already have.
Link To Your Linkers
You may not feel comfortable giving some random blogger SEO advice, and even if you did they probably aren’t going to take the time to fix their little hobby blog. But what you CAN do is go get yourself an account on various social bookmarking websites and openly bookmark the pages that link to you. A couple low-quality links from places like Delicious (Yes, the profile page links are noindex, but have you checked the feed pages…) are better than no links at all, and all it takes is a few well-placed bookmarks to keep that obscure blog post on Google’s radar.
Promote Your Linkers
Someone might link to you from a good post worthy of submission to places like Digg and Stumbleupon. Every once in awhile I find an obscure blog (sometimes even on a blogger or wordpress subdomain) linking to a client from a quality post. More than a few times I’ve submitted one of them to Digg and hit the front page with it.
The Result
The blog entry linking to you gets a huge boost in PR, stays permanently indexed, and passes some of that link juice on to your website.
And you never even had to ask for a link…
Added Bonus
Sometimes the blogger will notice that the post they made about your site is consistently bringing in traffic, which can motivate them to blog about your website more often. 
Tips
Try not to ONLY bookmark and submit sites that link to you. Mix it up. Don’t create a pattern. Use different bookmarking / SMO sites and possibly different profiles.
Don’t give your Digg or Stumbleupon profiles a bad name by linking to crappy posts just because they link to you or a client. Instead, link to the poorer quality posts using straight bookmarking (as opposed to voting) websites and focus your SMO efforts on posts that are worthy of voting for.
If you find that a particular blog is linking to you or a client often, it might be worth subscribing to their feed using various feed readers and personalized homepage widgets (‘add content’ link).
{ 2 comments }
Good post with lots of excellent advice. One question though. Do the SEs index/cache feed pages like the one you pointed out at Delicious. That is to say have do the links count from these pages as a ‘normal’ link would count?
Mike, if you subscribe to a feed using your MyYahoo or Google Feedreader account and the links in that feed do not have a nofollow attribute attached to them… I would think they count toward your link popularity, or at the very least get followed.
If you wanted to though, you could start a blog on blogger, WordPress, or Typepad and reproduce your feed there just as you would when showing any other feed on your site. Call the blog So-and-So’s Delicious Feed…
Comments on this entry are closed.