Seeding The Link
This isn’t really advanced-level stuff, but it does go beyond the white and into the gray. It is not something you should do without thinking about possible consequences. And remember not to take it too far! Some may call this tactic by a different name, or it may not have a name at all. If not, please allow me…
What Link Seeding IS:
Helping search engines find pages that link to you, and ensuring that blog posts linking to you don’t get lost in the abyss. They are also a good reference so you don’t have to sift through pages and pages of scraper spam when doing a linkdomain command. Another use is to get a newly launched site indexed. The quicker you get a site up, the quicker it gets indexed, and the sooner it begins to develop trust just for “being around”. So get it up and get it indexed…
What Link Seeding Is NOT:
Seeding Links Is Not a way to get link popularity into your page from the page where the link is seeded. The idea is not to link to your own website, since the page on which your seed appears is never really going to have much page rank anyway. It is a dangerous waste of time that you could spend creating content that others will want to link to from pages with a much higher page rank.
Examples of Places On Which You Can Seed Links:
http://del.icio.us/ (note: delicious is nofollow)
http://freelink.org/
http://linksnarf.com/
Now that you have an idea of what to look for in a pot when planting your seeds, get creative and think of some on your own. For instance, what about a blog on a free blogger site dedicated to announcing when your company has been mentioned in the media? This would be sort of an off-site “In The News” blog. It doesn’t necessarily have to be connected with your company – officially. It could just be a fan’s site. 
What to look for in a seeding pot:
- Check the source code and make sure that there aren’t any nofollow tags in the meta or within the link code itself.
- Check the robots.txt file and make sure that robots are allowed in that section/page.
- Check to make sure the links are not going through a redirect. For instance, the links on http://www.feedmelinks.com/ .
In other words, just make sure the page is crawlable and that the links will be followed to your page.
Remember, the idea is not to link to your own established, well indexed website. There are much, much more effective ways to do that.
PS: It doesn’t do you much good if your link seed page isn’t found either. Just make sure it gets indexed.
Naughty Tip: Did you read this post?
Another form of seeding links is to do so from within your own website to promote deeper, faster crawling. For instance, I happen to know that my blog gets crawled more often than any other page on my website. I also know it has a high page rank that can be passed on to other pages on my own website. So if I wanted my page about Bowflex to get crawled right away, I would find a clever (or not so clever) way of linking to it from a blog entry. …such as this.
{ 1 comment }
Someone just asked me why you wouldn’t just put the seed on your own site. The answer is simple: It would make all of those links reciprocal instead of one-way.
I have no problem linking to blogs that link to me if I think they’re good blogs. But that’s another story.
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