Backlinking 202

Hey it's Kris, and I wanted to talk about the new era of linking. Lately I've been doing a lot of testing with links and I wanted to share my experiences with you. I'll be talking about the strategies I used to get a PR2 in two weeks - not a particularly high PR, but not too bad if you ask me.

Feel free to ask questions, or add anything to the discussion.

PageRank.
You don't need to have a link from a particular page with PageRank, it turns out all you need to do is have it from the site. I see a lot of people saying otherwise, but after a week I show up higher in the ranks for my keyword.

My long-tail keyword is "blog tips to help you make money blogging" and there are a lot of different keywords in there and my vanity keyword is "kris roxas." I rank no. 2 under my Twitter for it -.-' When I was no.1 before, but somehow I'm being bumped.

I now show up on the 2nd page for that term, I'm hoping to show up for related keywords after another week or two and I'm pretty psyched.

I also have a PageRank after building these links =) awesome! I have no idea when I'll be able to rank for the short-tail terms, but I am also getting some authority links.

"Spammy" Links
You can't really get penalized for having spammy links... Unless you take part in a link-farm, then you can't get punished. I have sites aggregating my site to their feed, and I'm doing fine. I even have my ping.fm accounts aggregating my content through a plugin and I'm fine.

You can't get punished for something you can't control either. If the system were designed in a way that punished you for something you have no power over - the internet would crash in about a week. Your competitors would just need to get you spammy links, and you'd fail. You CAN'T do that.

Links are links, even if they're spammy.

You've probably heard of getting "natural links." When people just link to you because they like you. Well, this is close to that. You can't control which sites do or do not link to you so don't sweat it.

Relevance.
It turns out this doesn't matter when you're building authority. Maybe not when you're trying to get traffic, but building authority you don't need relevant links.

The only thing that technically matters are the words...

Some people will be like, "Hey! This kid doesn't know what the hell he's doing!" Okaayyyy - try proving me wrong. Build yourself 100+ quality links from irrelevant sites and see if it helps. It does, trust me.

Search engines can't make distinctions that humans can. They basically just know words. It would take people so long to be able to distinguish every single page, so they wouldn't even bother because the man-power needed to carry that out would be enormous.

Indexing.
Links do NOT need to be indexed to work. Google will notice these links long before they're indexed, and count them as links to your site. You may prefer that it's indexed, but it really works its' magic when Google is just aware of the pages' existence.

Even ask Angela! She'll prove it to you more than I ever could.

Internal Linking.
When you do internal linking, do you use anchor text? Or do you say, "click here to check out my post"? I actually does make a difference when you can link to yourself like, "make money blogging" or "grow big tomatoes".

I made two related posts about Twitter and the only thing I did different was make an internal link with the keyword, and it was showing up in the top 10 in Google while the other one didn't.

Upcoming Linking Prediction.
Social media - Twitter, Digg, and all that - will be important. You know, it's hard to get 1,000 tweets or Diggs. It's a lot less hard to build links through commenting, forums, press releases, or even just buying them. I'm betting they'll be holding more weight in the future.

Again, feel free to add anything or ask any questions.

>> Kris Roxas