Wed 25 Nov 2009
Build Links Via Testimonials – Like Google
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)I’ve seen a few people mention this kind of link building tactic in the past but i thought seeing as Google itself does it for others, it’s an example worth highlighting, and perhaps copying.
This looks like a decent link for those linked at Google Press Center….. a single outbound contextual link on a cached PR7 page on a very trusted domain.
If your following Google’s example, it’s perfect for sites with exact match domains, too.
Best practice (if your looking to get a link, or at least host such a page on your own site)?
- Link to the home page
- Use The URL keywords or domain name as in the example
- You don’t need to identify the person who gives the testimonial outright
- One external link to a non related property on a page? (I surmise)
If Google does it… it must be ok? Right?
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
Do you think the submission form takes html to make the clickable link?
Well… I just tried it with html in the link.
You get this message after submitting:
You should receive a confirmation email from us shortly. If we’re interested in exploring your story further, we’ll get in touch.
Will let you know how it goes – and thanks for the top tip!
I guess it will be a nofollow-link (or not clickable anymore) in some days if this gets well-known…
LOL I wasn’t really meaning submit a testimonial to Google, more take their lead….
Well, it was a good place to start ^^^ :p
This is something we should really look into!
Hi Shaun,
I want to firstly blow the wind up you and say, you have some great information on here and, you are very in depth with your research – which tells me you are doing things right.
In my opinion, when anyone is selecting a company to look at their business, it’s more than favorable to see “WIP” within the business, and how they actually do look at different ways and methods to see just how “G” reacts, even the simple stuff!
Well, it wouldn’t be normal after that much wind, not to ask a question of you and see/hear your thoughts:
“We have personally been taken for a serious ride with our seo – and have now reached the 6 months of being live and have no pages ranking on page one, well, apart from the ones that we created and have been bookmarking!”
My question is this: If for example, we were given a list of words and phrases that were going to be exploited by the seo team, would it not be predent to say that you need to have those words or phrases at least once on a page for “G” to take any interest?”
Our site has now reached 190+ pages and is growing daily (original site count was 30 on day one) but, all the terms and expressions we were told would be the low hanging fruit, are still only on Page3,4,5 and 6 in some cases….
Back to the same thing IMO – content is king??
Look forward to coming back and reading some more, and who knows, you may even get some business out of it! Oh, and before I close, I didn’t create a link back, but should you wish to take a sniff, then feel free to contact me.
Regards
Dan (pen name)
I’m not convinced. Just because Google is doing something doesn’t mean we can do the same thing and not get classified as a link dump. We can’t safely assume that the people who run Google’s press center have any SEO considerations at all.
Would you listen to anyone else who says “do as I say, not as I do”?
@ Dan if you don’t have the keywords on your page, and prominent, you’re VERY MUCH swimming upstream, and the current against you is getting stronger all the time. A basic prerequisite of ranking for terms is having those terms and related terms on the actual page your targeting.
Content is king? Useful content is king for humans, Google prefers links from trusted websites to your content.
Each page needs to be crafted (titles, content) around a few keyterms.
Just adding content and not getting links pointing to your site with the keywords in them won’t improve your positioning for a competitive term.
Great post! Do you have an RSS feed I could … Oh hang on, I’m not on the comment spam post.
Do you think google counts its own pages in its pagerank calculations? SharkSEO had another tip for a link from google. But I’m sure I remember reading some throw away comment that google ignores links on its own domain. I can’t find it again, and I can’t remember whether it was a blanket ban or robots.txt driven or ….
Good tip, I submitted a testimonial, i’ll have to see how it works.