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How I Got Millions of Viral Backlinks

by jaygould33
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Back in 2004 I created one of the first viral video sharing sites. The site was called MusicVideoCodes. I had users copy & paste an embed code with their favorite music videos on their profile page for sites like MySpace, BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, etc.

Since music is inherently a form of self expression, and due to the sight, sound and motion of video, people loved the idea of identifying themselves with their favorite music video to show all their friends and strangers their personality.

It fit really well with the mishmosh profiles on MySpace and grew incredibly fast. Within 6 months we had 40 million videos being streamed daily! I eventually sold that business to a NYC based startup and became the co-owner.

But one of the things that we did to SEO the crap out of our site was to dynamically change the href anchor tags in our embed codes for all of the keywords we wanted to target for SEO purposes. There were like 500k embeds being copy / pasted daily, so you can imagine how rapid our SEO strategy was spreading...

If you're looking to virally create backlinks for your site to better SEO it... perhaps you should look towards viral embed widgets that still exist, and tell them you'll pay them to link to you for the keywords you're trying to SEO.

i'm not sure how google reacts to this today, but back in 2004, they placed us at the top for the results for all of the keywords we targeted.
#backlinks #millions #viral
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by jaygould33 View Post

    Back in 2004 I created one of the first viral video sharing sites. The site was called MusicVideoCodes. I had users copy & paste an embed code with their favorite music videos on their profile page for sites like MySpace, BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, etc.

    Since music is inherently a form of self expression, and due to the sight, sound and motion of video, people loved the idea of identifying themselves with their favorite music video to show all their friends and strangers their personality.

    It fit really well with the mishmosh profiles on MySpace and grew incredibly fast. Within 6 months we had 40 million videos being streamed daily! I eventually sold that business to a NYC based startup and became the co-owner.

    But one of the things that we did to SEO the crap out of our site was to dynamically change the href anchor tags in our embed codes for all of the keywords we wanted to target for SEO purposes. There were like 500k embeds being copy / pasted daily, so you can imagine how rapid our SEO strategy was spreading...

    If you're looking to virally create backlinks for your site to better SEO it... perhaps you should look towards viral embed widgets that still exist, and tell them you'll pay them to link to you for the keywords you're trying to SEO.

    i'm not sure how google reacts to this today, but back in 2004, they placed us at the top for the results for all of the keywords we targeted.
    Lol, I swear I've never read this post until just now, but I had a PM the other day that I recommended this exact strategy to.

    Funny how when you think you have a unique idea, other people have already been doing the same thing for a long time.

    I'm glad I found this thread & congratulations on all the user generated backlinks.

    I actually got the idea from tinypic.com, & how they have multiple code formats for sharing images on different platforms (forums, websites, etc...), so I was thinking that would be cool to run a custom php script that picks random keywords that you want to target & places those keywords in the code that the users/traffic will share on external sites. This way your traffic is building targeted keyword backlinks at random from a list of keywords in the php script.

    Again thanks, & I can't believe nobody else has commented on this, it's a genius idea for letting traffic build links. The key is making the content interactive (sharing images, videos, content, etc...).
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  • Profile picture of the author GMT
    How much did you sell the company for?
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  • Profile picture of the author adriel97
    Thanks for sharing. Some great insight here. With Google's new algorithms though, who knows if this will work today.
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