Brandon Hopkins' Reputation Management and SEO Blog

How To Get 29 Free Links

Here is my personal list of places that I go when I start a new site to get free links. These 29 links always get the ball rolling and help natural links come in.

Blogs

Blogs have become some of my favorite places to get free links. All you have to do is register a blog and post a short article relevant to your site and then post your link. Below you’ll find 24 free blogs in which you can link to your site.

Make sure that you interlink these blogs somewhat so that they all get found by the bots.

1. Squidoo.com
Create a free account, write an article and post a link embedded in the text back to your site.

2. WordPress.com
Create a free blog, write a short post and link back to your site.

3. Blogger.com
Create a free blog and write 3 posts, one linking to your Squidoo lens, one linking to your WordPress.com blog and one linking back to your main site.

4. MindSay.com
Mindsay offers free blogs and wikis. Like the others, create a free blog and post a link back to your website. Also link this blog to your Squidoo lens.

5. BloggerParty.com
Another free blog site. Link your post to one of your other free blogs and your site.

6. BraveNet Blog
Bravenet has been around a LONG time. Like the others, post then link.

7. 3Steps.com
3Steps is new but also free…make sure to continue interlinking these blogs so they all get found and indexed.

8. The Right Blogger
Site seems to be down right now…can’t create new blogs. Check back later.

9. BootsnAll TravelBlogs
You must first be approved as a member, then apply for a blog. Might not be worth the effort. Blog posts must be travel related. Hopefully your niche is travel related as well.

10. iUpload Blog
Another free blog…

11. TravelPod Blog
Travel related free blog site.

12. Bloggates
Free blog, slow site. Many good subdomains are still available.

13. Livejournal
Old, established, easy to use.

14. BlogText.com
Sites don’t seem to index well, but allows a lot of outgoing links.

15. Xanga.com
Does Xanga allow outgoing links? Couldn’t figure it out.

16. Blogigo.com
Allows outgoing links, even had a spammer listed as an example blog in a category…

17. SoulCast.com
Soulcast gives free blogs and allows you to insert your Adsense ID and they’ll automatically publish Adsense code blocks.

18. MyDietBlogger.com
MyDietBlogger offers health and diet blogs for free. Perfect for someone in a health related niche.

19. BlogNow.com.au
Free blog site touting their “No Ads” approach. I don’t know why they’ve chosen to not display ads, because not monetizing and not selling the site doesn’t seem like a good business model. I don’t think you have to by Australian to signup.

20. 20Six.co.uk
Good looking blogs, 1000+ template designs, outgoing links.

21. Vox.com
More free blogs…large site, established.

22. Tripod (remember them?)
Tripod, home to thousands of amateur webmasters has free blogs.

23. Aeonity.com
Free blog site, themes are all similar. Small user community.

24. Blogslive
One of my new favorites. Lots of themes available. Quick loading, outgoing links.

Comments on .edu Blogs

Personally I don’t think SE’s actually abide by the nofollow code. With that in mind I give you some of the best places to post comments.

The reason most of these are great places to comment is because they have PR or are popular posts.

25. PR6 – How the Cookie Crumbled: A Recap of the 2006 Creative Services Holiday Party
Most of the old pages are PR6. Comments are held for the moderator so make them legit.

26. PR4 – Blog comment spam with plagiarized text: hard to spot
Interesting discussion in 2006 relating to blog comment spam.

27. PR4 – Google bombs – Voice option and collective action

28. PR4 – Additional Comments Regarding Computers

29. PR3 – Blog is back to normal
First comment is moderated.

Most of those were found using this method and applying a few more keywords.

Hopefully those 29 locations will inspire you to find other places that will give you a free link!

By Brandon|April 13th, 2007|Link Building|72 Comments

Text-Link-Ads.com March Coupon

If you want to buy some links through Text-Link-Ads.com first you can get $100 in FREE Links and still use the 15% coupon code below.

March 2007 Text-Link-Ads.com coupon code: springÂ

With the above link and code, you can buy a link at Brandon-Hopkins.com for pretty cheap, less than $20/month actually!

By Brandon|March 29th, 2007|Link Building|0 Comments

SEO Authority Contest – Free Entry!

It’s time for my first ever contest. I don’t have much to offer except a free site review ($150 value) and the knowledge that Technorati thinks you’re blog is a great SEO Authority.

Here’s how this will work. Within the next week, make a post that links to my blog (homepage is best, but that’s up to you). I’ll check Technorati’s Authority page for this blog and whoever is listed above Jim Boykin’s wonderful post will get a free site review. This means we could have up to 10 winners!

No purchase necessary, anyone can enter. You will have to claim your winnings. I’ll try to email, but no guarantee I’ll be able to get a hold of anyone.Â Currently there is one site ranking above Jim’s post, and if they want to claim a free site review, they’ll get it!

So get your entry in, and help me give out some free site reviews!

By Brandon|March 24th, 2007|Link Building, Reviews|2 Comments

5 Things I Learned About Diggers

So you want to know how to get Dugg to the front page of Digg right? Of course, who doesn’t. But just to let you know, the traffic is great, but apart from that, you might not realize the following things that I’ve learned in the last few days about Diggers (Digg users):

1. Diggers don’t click many ads. I know, everyone already knew this, but I know why they don’t click ads. Digg users don’t click ads because Diggers are title driven. Digg users read a title and want to find that information, and only that information.

In addition to that, they are contextually ad-blind. Unless your ads stand out, this crowd won’t click. And if they do stand out, make sure they aren’t obtrusive, Digg users don’t like annoying and obtrusive.

2. Diggers navigate throughout your whole site. Contrary to popular opinion, Diggers don’t just read your article and hit the back button. Every single page in my site was viewed by at least 10 people, that includes category pages and archives. Some pages were viewed over 600 times.

3. Diggers DO sign up for your RSS feed. I have only given this site it’s new SEO vision in the last two weeks. Before that is was just my personal stuff, and of course had 0 RSS subscribers. Last week the subscribers peaked at 32. Today they are at 236! Who knows what tomorrow will hold, maybe more, maybe less. We’ll find out soon.

4. Diggers have good memories. Before my Digg article, nobody knew my name or searched for my name. So far, in 3 days 73 people have searched for and found me by name. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but I can’t hide here any more!

5. Diggers leave nice comments. All but one of my comments seem to be positive. The only one that was borderline was someone named MASA who said, “So wait, if you know so much about SEO and Page Rank then why do you have a PR of 2?” Of course, if he would have read anything on this blog he would have know that as of two weeks ago, this blog was just personal and I didn’t care if anyone read or linked to it. PR 2 is pretty good without doing anything, right? 🙂

So I don’t think I can exploit this digg for any more posts. Here are my Digg related posts over the last few days:

Digg Killed Me and I Liked It

How To: Get a SEO Blog to Diggâ€™s Front Page – The 6 Câ€™s

Add Digg This! Button to WordPress Posts and Float Right

The original: 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007

By Brandon|March 23rd, 2007|SEO/SEM|5 Comments