SEO Shadow

Part 2: Link building on ultra authority websites

In the first part of our authority link building series, we spoke about the challenges of getting linked directly by a .edu site. We concluded that although a front-page Harvard backlink would get Google interested, the costs and likelihood of making this happen are somewhat unrealistic.

Well, it’s time to get our hands dirty and plunge in to some rule bending link building with authority websites as our prime target. Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this method isn’t going to win a Noble prize. It can however, if done correctly, send some strong link authority to a money site. And we all know how beneficial that can be.

As we’ve already seen, .edu sites with linking potential are few and far between. Restricted mainly to educational institutions, we can expect a hard fight in getting our site repped on these closely monitored networks.

I’d like to introduce two alternatives - one which may seem riddled in difficulties, and one which you probably haven’t heard of unless you’re UK based.

The domains I’m talking about are .gov and .sch.uk.

Now, as you’re probably aware, .gov is reserved for the highest breed of authority websites on the net - government websites. The less documented .sch.uk is basically the UK’s answer to .edu. They’re not quite a carbon match since university websites in the UK are generally marked with .ac.uk.

Still, we’re going to target .sch.uk. These websites benefit from a Google sized authority boost, but they’re about a thousand times easier to get links on. You wonder why? It’s because most high school homepages are built by junior webmasters and maintained by IT departments that don’t have the slightest clue about the intricacies of Black Hat SEO.

Let’s open up Google and run a basic search.

*sch.uk

This will return every last .sch.uk website in Google’s index. Now we can do a bit of side research and build up a list of school homepages that we’re going to target.

You’ll soon notice that most of these websites are built with the industry rulebook of 2003. Most of them have a Useful Links page. A closer look and we can get an idea of the types of websites that the school is prepared to link to.

That’s all well and good, but how can we convince a busy IT department that our commercial website deserves a mention on their homepage? 

There are a huge variety of methods for making this possible, but all require some underhanded tactics and a little good will hunting.

So, we’re going to build a brand new White Hat website from scratch and hyper-focus it on a cause that a high school IT department wouldn’t think twice about linking to. Let’s say, oh I don’t know, a campaign against bullying?

We start phase 2 of our authority link building and construct a glistening clean White Hat website to draw our targets’ attention. We don’t need to go overboard, but a clean corporate layout and some happy smiling kids’ faces wouldn’t go amiss. 

Our niche is going to be a completely fabricated campaign against bullying. We’re going to supply fake contact details, fake phone numbers, a made-up story about our campaign, and some genuinely helpful information on how to combat bullying.

Remember, this is all in the name of a good cause. We need to offer something that’s going to be seen as worthy link-bait to a high school webmaster. Don’t even think about selling anything commercial on the new site - it has to be spring clean and 100% inoffensive.  

Now that we have a convincing on-topic site, we need to put together a convincing email pitch to get our link placed on the .sch.uk sites. I’m not going to advise you here. If you can’t write a good email link pitch, pay somebody else to do it for you. I’ll give you a clue though: sympathy sells.

Just make every effort to weld yourself in to the high school’s good books. Explain why you’re seeking a link to raise awareness of your cause.

Hell, you can go all the way and create little “I’m in” link buttons if you really want to be ruthless in your campaign. Now that we’ve established a few backlinks from authority .sch.uk websites, we let our project settle.

Leave your anti-bullying site for a couple of months and wait for any skepticism to pass. When the time is right, run a simple 301 re-direct and funnel the link juice towards your money site. Only the shrewdest of webmasters will pick up on the trick, and you can always fall back on the excuse that you purchased the campaign domain after it expired! Worst case scenario, your link will be removed, but we can deal with that.

You’ll have to use a little creativity and some of your imagination to come up with a niche cause that works for this method. I’m also going to leave you to consider how you might go about getting a link from a .gov site.

What do government sub-sites link to? You might assume that they stick to other similar .gov sites. You’d be wrong.

I managed to slot my link on a PR8 .gov website and it proved so successful, I had second thoughts about ever re-directing it. Such was the search engine performance boost that came with the high authority link. You have to treat these campaigns as the short term traffic injections that they are.

Don’t get greedy. Don’t gain 20 authority links and re-direct your site within the first 48 hours. Chances are, somebody will open their email a few days late and wonder what the hell happened to your good charitable cause.

The best thing is - if you’re really smart - using this kind of opportunist site building, it’s possible to gain an astronomical amount of backlinks simply by focusing on a niche that is of high public relevance. We just need to get our link bait out there in the first place.

To help you in your quest for .gov links (and any other), I’ll give you a good starting point. Think of current issues that are dominating the public eye. Now, I don’t know what’s hot on the news in your part of the world. But where I am, websites on green issues, knife crime and racism are sure to offer opportunities for those quick enough to pounce on them…

Tags: .edu, .gov, .sch.uk, authority links, Black Hat, Link Building, SEO   Posted in Link Building