Regardless of what sites you visit, the internet is moving faster and faster every day as more people log on for the first time and more individuals start up their own sites and look for ways to promote their work.
It can be close to impossible to keep your links and content visible on third-party domains, but there are also some ways you can take advantage of the internet’s speed from an administration and development point of view.
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Crowd-Sourced Content Onslaught
If you let them, they will link. If you want random people you’ve never met to start writing content for your websites, all you have to do is give them a place to start forum threads or submit bookmark links.
A few things are essential here:
Nofollow links probably won’t attract too much quality content. People who spend time spamming links at nofollow domains aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer and their content probably isn’t the kind of stuff we want to acquire even if the cost is zero.
Dofollow links have to be thoroughly moderated. There’s not much worse you can do for your website’s reputation in the search engines than suddenly post 1000 links to a shady site with a completely unrelated topic. The last thing you want to do is imply that you endorse those sites – so any attempt at crowd-sourcing content will require some oversight at the very least.
Regardless of the link’s status in transfering pagerank, you’ll also need to have some kind of CAPTCHAs and Akismet spam-checkers in order to reduce the total volume of noise you have to sort through. Whatever you do, just make sure the auto-linking bots cannot register and post to your site! As soon as someone finds a script to flood your pages, you’re in big trouble because they’ll also be able to easily switch IP addresses and create new user accounts. One week of an automated free-for-all can leave you cleaning up dozens of rotten posts.
But wait, once you’ve got a forum or bookmarking site generating content for you, how do you take advantage of that fact? Well, the obvious way is site-wide links to the blog, sales page, or domain you’re trying to rank for. Turn every new submission into an off-domain backlink to your favorite site – just remember to keep the domains on different IP addresses and utilize DNS privacy to get the full benefit out of this.
Ultra-Niche Micro-Blogging:
Another strategy I’ve been putting to work in the content onslaught is the ultra-niche micro-blog.
…What? Ok, let’s get past the buzz and show how simple this concept is.
Start with a keyword fortified domain name related to the pages or keywords you want the primary site to link for. Build some sitewide links while the micro-blog is young.
Now, all you have to do is make sure that all of the content submitted to the micro-blog is extremely focused on the niche you’re writing about. These posts don’t have to be refined or authoritative – you can just use this as a scrap notebook where you post any 50 or 100 words about the topic that pop in to your mind. See a cool link or funny commercial? Blog it, even if you’re not sure what you think or you’re lacking the cool social-media-friendly headline.
So the micro-blog may end up with fairly pathetic pagerank – but who cares? It is extremely on-topic to the pages you’re trying to rank and it is incredibly easy to create huge volumes of content in a short time. Don’t worry about promoting the micro-blog too much, but a few links from the random bookmarking sites out there will probably help ensure that you’re fully indexed and passing some juice.
Build, Build, Build…
Quality or Quantity? Yes! The trick is to know where each one belongs. Obviously, it would be great to write instant-classic posts every time, but that’s not a very practical or realistic strategy. Know where and how to mass produce content, and you’ll have something back behind your favorite content propping it up for the world to see. Just start off with your primary or important domains, then continue to build new ones underneath them. Know where the quality belongs, but make sure you’ve got a huge volume of quantity backing it up!
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