Link Building SEO/SEM, — March 16, 2007 — 32 Comments

Get 1 Link and Go! Drive By Linking.

closeThis post was published 5 years 2 months 4 days ago. In SEO, things change quickly and this advice might be out of date. Just wanted to let you know before acting on the advice. :)

In the early 2000′s, a link was a link. Plain and simple, more links, better rankings. But that was 7 years ago. Today, Googlebot is smarter and can learn to hate you. So how can you fix that? Get 1 link per domain and get out of there.

Here is what I mean:

Find a blog you like, leave a comment, find another blog you like.

Or:

Find a site that is relevant, email the webmaster, asking for a link on a certain page, buy a permanent link, and don’t buy any more links from that seller.

With this strategy, you’re protecting your site from Google’s backlash, it is also harder to detect these links because they are in-content, topical, relevant to your industry, in fact almost impossible to detect by a bot.

It is hard to link to these types of pages because they are hard to find. You can look in the comments of most SEO blogs because people usually are looking for links so they hit and run the blog.

There are about 15 blogs that I like enough and find valuable enough to comment on regularly. These blogs I don’t hit and run, but most others I do.

Get a link and go!

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About Brandon Hopkins

I'm a professional link builder with a team of full time link builders and clients around the world. Contact me as soon as you're ready to rank #1. This post was written by .

32 Comments

  1. That’s awesome advice, thanks!

  2. Domester.NET says:

    This is the one great tip for traffic by Search Engine.

  3. Great tip as usual, your blog is great!

  4. shen says:

    I am starting now!!

  5. Shane says:

    That’s not good advice. Since virtually all blog comments still use nofollow, Google will actually never see those links. Plus, if you only leave one comment per blog, you’re depriving yourself of lots potential traffic (as you describe here) — with is the main benefit of leaving comments. Finally, it takes a lot of links from one site to look unnatural to Google, and even then, they’ll just devalue the links, not penalize your site.

    (P.S. The “leave a comment” link in this post has a stray “http//” in it that’s causing the link not to work.)

  6. Brandon says:

    Shane, thanks for the comments. Regardless of nofollow, I think 1 link is still the best. I don’t know how much engines actually listen to the nofollow command. I would like to think that they do, but I still think they value the link, maybe not as much, but it isn’t completely devalued. Their algo’s are so intricate they could easily give weight to a nofollow without anyone noticing.

  7. GG says:

    Nice tip. Thanks, I will try it out!

    http://www.winatmoney.com

  8. josh says:

    At first I was thinking… well comments are no followed but then I realized you are talking about traffic and not “links” in the PR way. Just good old fashioned traffic. And if you are posting on related websites then you’ll pretty targeted traffic too. Some good advice I’m going to try and make more use of. I’ve been a bit monolithic and uncreative in my strategies I’m realizing.

  9. josh says:

    Also I’d like to weigh in on the “nofollow” thing. I have noticed Yahoo Site Explorer ignoring “no follow” which is kind of upsetting for me personally because I’ve been using “nofollow” to cut off the members area of my forum to stop the tons of spammers i get who join my forums just to be on the members list so they can link to crap. On the other hand I think Google really does ignore “nofollowed” links. And I’ve seen that they don’t cache my nofollowed links.. I’m not sure about MSN/Live but I would bet they don’t even know what’s going on.

    But I do think Shane makes a good point in that some blogs are particularly popular in a niche and you could possibly get a lot more traffic by leaving comments on multiple posts and not only that you could really get into a working conversation with people interested in the same things as you.

    I’ve got all of my blogs set up on blogger (I know.. ewwww) which really seems to stop people from wanting to comment as much. But my blogs are mostly not about SEO and stuff like that, so… In a way I think it just stops spam but I do like the way this site is set up for leaving comments much better. Much more likely to start a conversation this way.

  10. Fashion Guy says:

    So more is less as usual and that sitewide links are punished?

  11. EJ Cooksey says:

    Great tip…Can’t wait to put it into action!
    Will continue reading your blog for even more tips.

    Thanks!

  12. John says:

    I am in the Student Loan industry http://www.studentloanfinancialgroup.com and .edu are gold for my site. I just submitted to 50 or so blogs using this idea. I will let you know how it works out.

  13. M Georgeson says:

    Nice idea – thanks

  14. Chee Kui says:

    Good advice :p
    And that’s what I am doing now. Haha!

  15. For Google anyway NOFOLLOW == NOFOLLOW.

    No juice through a NOFOLLOW link for sure.

  16. Hobo SEO says:

    Thought of this and posted a Q on Webmasterworld a couple of months back but no-one answered!

    A good site you have, here :)

  17. Don’t forget that technorati loves it when more blogs link to your blog as well. and technorati doesn’t care if the link is a nofollow or not.

    Google will follow a nofollow sometimes from what we have seen – but whether or not they give that relevance to them in regards to PR is still up in the air.

  18. Mark says:

    This is safe strategy. But I think this is’t too risky when you will add more than 1 link per blog.

  19. [...] Brandon’s done it to me too. Both my sites (I don’t think he knows all of the rest [...]

  20. Thanks for all the great advise and tips! I hope I can make it work for my site, http://urbandatabase.com

  21. Great post. Keep up the advice which focuses on building links and traffic while still focusing on protecting the website from backlash.

  22. eDave says:

    Good tip we will put it to use as we try to build up some links for our new Man Quiz

  23. [...] Every day you will get an email from every site that Google has spidered that has your keywords.  Click the links, post a comment and move on.  Works in conjunction with Drive By Linking. [...]

  24. Excell says:

    As always, your tips are fantastic

  25. [...] I like to get one link and go. I think a single link on one domain is just as beneficial as a site-wide link, and possibly even [...]

  26. Adam says:

    this is one good idea. Theres a lot of good ideas on your site, I have been having a read through a big chunk of it today. keep it up!

  27. Garage Sale says:

    Even your links are no-follow so much for hit and runs?

  28. But finding related sites takes a lot of time.

    I try to go for breadth at times, but mostly I stick with quality circle of related bloggers.

  29. VitaminE says:

    Hi Brandon, Thank You for all the great advise and tips!
    I am starting now. :-)

  30. [...] If 50,000 links from the same domain mattered in the search results, wouldn’t everyone just create 50,000 subdomains and put a link to their main site?  And if that happened, wouldn’t it be easy to detect by a search engine?  By the way, I’ve been saying this for 4 years now.  Get one link and go! [...]

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