Well, even though google doesn't count more than a couple inbound links from a domain, by actually posting on the forum, you add more links that increase your chances of getting crawled.

And the name of the game is getting crawled (ie having search engine spiders find a link to your site, follow it and index your pages), because the more often the search engines visit your page, the more popular they see your page as (which helps your serp ranking)

This is where if you have a few posts in a forum it will increase your chances of getting crawled.

See, on forums there are thousands upon thousands of pages that a search engine spider could visit. And truth be told, they can't visit them all in a day. So even though you may have a link on one page buried deep down on the inside of a site, it may take days, weeks, months (or more) before a search engine spider actually finds the link to your site.

By posting multiple times, you speed up this process.

TIP: you want to post on pages with a high pagerank (as a high pagerank often shows the popularity of the page and will have more serp spider activity - ie a pr 7 page will have spiders visit more often than a pr1 page) and a high level of popularity, as this will help increase your rankings.

Well gosh, since you're offering, how about we - well, I... - get greedy and just ask for your entire backlink strategy, and with the how to do it along with the what to do? :-)

David

The number of high pr links needed depends on the amount of competition for the search term you are targeting.

So, yes, you do need more than your competitor, but there are other factors involved.

Such as:

-onpage seo. You have to see what they're doing on their page and then do a slightly better job in regards to the use of your tags, keyword density, etc
-link anchor text - you have to change this up and vary what's included in your anchor text

Time also comes into play here. Even though you may have more links than your competition, it doesn't mean that you're going to rank higher than them immediately. It can take a few days, or weeks for google to update it's serp listings to where you see your improvements show up for your linkbuilding efforts

Does that help?

How long is a piece of string?

The answer to your question is unknowable. There isnt a magic number of backlinks - that gets you ahead of your competitor. Is it possible they are going to keep building content and backlinks? YES.

To be honest, it's all about the quality of links that you get, and once you've built up a huge number of sites where you can post links to (while getting really hot links), it becomes a lot easier.

My specific guidance (for now anyways) would be not to waste your money on paid links or link exchanges - better to spend the time finding a competent worker who can post to the list of sites that you've gathered. Your time + money will be much better spent (check elance for workers like this)

It depends on how your affiliate links are structured. Most often i find that if they are a straight redirect, that google doesn't index the page that redirects to the affiliate offer

That being said, there are a couple ways that people have their redirects

Say for example you're selling your product on clickbank. Most affiliates will take the clickbank hoplink and use it. This does nothing for your pagerank (though search engines may see some traffic increase to your site which helps the popularity of your site), but it helps clickbank (because all links are pointing to them, and then they redirect to your sales page).

The other way is to run your own affiliate links that redirect back to clickbank (so the links the affiliate use are something like: yourdomain.com/aff=4384 instead of 48jfaf.clickbanksite.com or however they look

Hopefully that helps. Basically you want all affiliate links pointing to your website (not the payment processors) if you're wanting to increase your serp ranking

Software is pretty hit or miss. You can get results using it, but they aren't usually as effective. As most software can't break captchas (though i know of a couple programs that can), most comments/submissions get filtered out.

So in a list of 2000 you may end up with 10 submissions or so, just because of the additional security, how quickly sites change etc

I'm not saying don't use software (because you can get some results) - but you've got to really be careful about using good software, as most people will pitch you saying that all you need to do is press a button and you'll get top serp rankings

There are sooo many different factors to consider that I can't just give you a simple answer.

Some of the things to consider:
-the amount of competition
-how new the domain you are promoting is
-what sites you are linking from
-how quickly your links are found and indexed by the search engines


And that's just the beginning.

Your friend has the right idea, though. Slow and steady submissions for your main site are the safest way to go.

If you go too crazy, you will get de-indexed (as it sounds like that may be what's happening with you)

If you want to go nuts with the linkbuilding, set up a free blog somewhere (like at blogspot) and bookmark it like crazy and see what happens. That way if you are dropped from the serps, no big deal. (Just remember to put a few links on the blogspot page to the main site you want to promote)

Unfortunately if you want specific tried and tested results, you may have to do them yourself. I'm not wanting to rain on your parade, but specific documented results are good in theory, but the minute you change the search term you're wanting to rank for, it changes everything.

For example, the techniques used to rank for "dogs" may not work for "wedding dresses" - the same techniques have to be scaled + adjusted accordingly for the term you want to rank for - so it's never a one size fits all approach

Ive heard this talked about, but not really explained. Whats the benefit to this or the downside to not having it?

I have many ideas richard :-)

Are you only interested in free solutions?

For starters, you could look for blogs to post comments on - that will help. There are millions of ideas - stay tuned and i'll tell you more later

What is your current ranking? If you're already ranking for the specific term you want, I'd concentrate on other things while slowly adding a few links here and there.

I will be coming out with a complete guide in the near future - so i'll keep you posted!

Well, if you're already getting a top ranking for those keywords, I wouldn't see it as being too much of a priority at the moment in terms of the amount of time, effort and money you spend on your backlinking efforts.

That being said, there's no guarantee that you'll be in the top spot forever. With that in mind, i think you should work on getting a few backlinks every month to your site. See it as preventative maintenance, so that you'll retain your top ranking and won't get booted out by a competitor in days to come.

But take it SLOW. You're already on top - so don't go crazy and throw up hundreds of backlinks to your site every day (or month!)

You don't have time to wait for days?

... boy are you spoiled...

it used to take weeks, now it takes days
be grateful for what you have