To Backlink or Not to Backlink, That is the Question…

socialadrThere is some controversy about backlinking for SEO purposes. Google doesn’t like “artificial” (read: paid) backlinks, and will even penalize a site for having lots of backlinks from “bad neighborhoods” or from other sites that you control.

OTOH, if you don’t do some backlinking, the search engines won’t find your page at all. In some cases, that’s not a biggie, since for some campaigns, it’s so much faster to get paid traffic that you probably wouldn’t bother. But if you like to blog (like I do), and you want your stuff to actually get read, you might find it worthwhile to do some backlinking.

One of the more ingenious backlinking sources I have found is SocialAdr. These clever folks came up with a way to do backlinking that spreads your backlinks out over hundreds of different places that aren’t under your control (from Google’s viewpoint), and does so in such a way that the users do essentially all the work! (Fortunately, it’s not an overwhelming amount of work.)

Signing up with SocialAdr is straightforward, and you have a choice of a free account or 3 levels of paid account. Personally, I suspect the free account is actually the best from an SEO standpoint (look for the green button on the home screen; it’s not on the “plans & pricing” page). You can only get about 15-20 “credits” per day on the free account, which keeps you under Google’s radar. I’m not sure whether they still offer setup services for the social bookmarking accounts, but if they do, that is well worth paying for. Setting up a couple of dozen social bookmarking accounts will take more than a day! But don’t get the monthly paid service; you probably won’t need it.

Part of setting up the SocialAdr account will be choosing the URLs that you want to backlink. There are instructions on the site, but basically, you can have up to 10 active URLs (on the free account), and you need to write up a spintax description for each of them for the use of other SocialAdr users to share.

Once you have set up all of your bookmarking accounts (or paid SocialAdr to set them up for you), you can log in once a day to get your daily ration of backlinks (which is typically less than 20-25 day at most, depending on things like how many “followers” your bookmarking accounts have). You can spread those backlinks over up to 10 active bookmarks of your own.

Here is a short video that covers my daily routine, more or less. The video is 10 minutes long, and I usually spend less than 5 minutes per day on the site, using tricks like opening up the various parts of the site on different tabs to get past the fact that they are very slow.

In summary, I have found SocialAdr to be a useful way to get a small number of initial backlinks to a page. If you have done a good job of writing your article so that people actually get some value from it, you will start to get other backlinks of the type that Google likes: “Natural.”

This entry was posted in SEO, Traffic generation. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply