What “used tires” taught me about link building

I’m a big fan of SEO.  Getting your website ranked in the search engines means you’ll always have a fresh supply of visitors going to your website.

I’m going to talk about ranking in Google in particular - because Google dominates the search market.

Now, no one really knows how Google ranks websites, but SEO people have been reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithm and came down to 3 ranking factors:

1.  Domain name
Believe it or not, domain name plays a large factor in how well your website will rank for a particular keyword.  Everything else being equal, funnyjokes.com will outrank hilariousjokes.com for the keyword “funny jokes.”

2. On-page Content
In summary, your content on your webpage needs to be relevant to the keyword.  In other words, if you want to rank for “funny jokes” you better have some pretty funny jokes or mentions of “funny jokes” text somewhere on your webpage (I don’t think Google knows of a funny joke when it actually come across one, yet).

3. Links
This is the biggie.  More people link back to your webpage, more votes you get in Google’s eyes.  The domain name factor is somewhat controllable by you (you can always try to get a domain with your keyword in it, pad it with a prefix or postfix), and on-page content factor is totally controllable - you can change the text, alter the keyword placement and how many times it’s mentioned and manipulate the keyword density and such.

However, links are tough to come by.  Or should I say, good, quality links are hard to come by.

There are several ways to get one-way links to your webpage.

You can submit your webpage or website to link directories such as DMOZ and other mom/pop run directory sites.  You can social bookmark.  You can write and submit articles with a link back to your site.  You can create blogs and link from them using free blogging service such as blogger.com, or wordpress.com.

You can also do blog commenting - meaning you go around other people’s blogs and leave a comment with a website URL, and when your comment is displayed your name will be hyperlinked to the website URL you entered (try making a comment below, and you’ll see what I mean).

Now, when it comes to blog commenting, one major drawback is that these links are usually tagged with a nofollow property - meaning Google won’t look at these links are having any significance to your ranking score.

However, Wordpress, one of the most popular blogging script used in the blogsphere allows developers to submit their own plugins.  One of them being “Top Commentators.”

top commentators plugin

What “Top Commentators” plugin does is it places a widget in the sidebar of your blog, and it lists the commentator’s name.  If you regularly contribute comments on a blog with “Top Commentators” plugin installed, sooner or later you will appear on that list.

What’s so great about getting yourself on the list is that the link back to your site is a dofollow link - meaning Google gives it credit.  Not only that, the widget is also visible on the blog’s homepage and post page, in a sense gives you a site-wide link.

OK, now you may ask, where do I find blogs with “Top Commentators” plugin installed?

I began my quest by searching “top commentators” in google (in quotes) and came across several blogs with that plugin installed.  You’ll know when a blog has it installed.  It’s pretty obvious.

Now I was about to give up searching because my search query includes a lot of articles about the plugin itself, rather than returning search results of just blogs with the plugin installed.

Then I noticed that “used tires” commentator seems to always show up on the list of several blogs’s Top Commentators list.  It’s hyperlinked to http://www.used-tire.net and indeed if you type in “used tires” in Google that site ranks in the top 10!

I then head over to Yahoo.com and made this search query:

linkdomain:used-tire.net -site:used-tire.net

What this search query does is it tells Yahoo to return all the webpages that link to used-tire.net.

Well, this little bit of reverse engineering paid off big time!

The result came out to be 54,900 webpages that link to the domain.

As I go down the results list, every single one of these websites are indeed blogs with Top Commentators plugin installed - and this “used tires” guy is on the list of almost every blog!

Jackpot!

What to do next

Now that I basically “stole” a list of blogs with Top Commentators plugin installed, the next thing I did was to subscribe to these blogs so I get notified by email whenever a new post is posted on these blogs.

The trick to getting on the list is to make a comment (and have it go past moderation) in a post that is recent.  Comments on older posts don’t seem to count.  However, I could be wrong, as I haven’t examine the Top Commentators plugin code (don’t you just love open source?).

The Blog List

Ok, so I’m in the process of building up a list of blogs with Top Commentators plugin enabled, and I know this should interest you if you are into SEO.  When I have it ready I will go ahead and send it to my blog subscribers.

If you want to get a hold of that list, be sure to get on my announcement list.