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This post is a little satirical, please do not use it as solid advice. It is more of an accidental case study that happened to me and I wanted to share it with my readers.

Back on March 15th, I made a simple one paragraph post mentioning that I bought an iPhone. For those of you who didn’t know, the iPhone was one of 2007’s most hyped online product launches, and nearly every technology blog in the world was keeping tabs on iPhone news. This also means that since it was being searched for a lot, there were a lot of blackhat search engine spammers trying to steal their piece of the pie by their use of content theft. They scrape blogs around the world that mention the word iPhone and then post a piece of that blog post on their blog hoping it will rank for long-tail keywords.

Well, it turns out a lot of those blackhat blogs that steal the content off other blogs are still focusing on the iPhone niche, because even though that post was one of my shortest “blurbs”, it has received far more spammy backlinks than any other post. In a sad piece of advice, if you mention the word “iphone” in one of your blog posts, you just might end up getting a TON of low-quality backlinks. — While these backlinks won’t help a lot in raising your rank on Google, you can still ping them with Technorati to improve your rank.

Here is a screen-capture of all the trackbacks of blogs that linked to my post about the iPhone. If history is doomed to repeat itself, this post will also receive a ton of these blog mentions.

4/21/2008 Update:  Right now, the site is redirecting to lifehack.org.  Either the site has closed down, or the website was temporarily hacked.  Try visiting listible.com and if it redirects you, then you can save your time by skipping this post, as it would be no longer valid.

For those of you who love building thousands of links from my different methods, you are in for another treat. While normally I blog about secret techniques that nobody else is talking about, this one has been a bit popular on Digitalpoint. I cannot take credit for this one (21/22 is a pretty good record I would say), I still want to tell you about it. Every single link counts and so I wanted to let those who haven’t heard about Listible join the fun.

Listible is a super simple website that displays lists about nearly everything. If you have a list about blog posts that are related to soccer, you can make a list for it. There are literally zero rules for what kind of lists you can build, meaning I can even make a list called Test List12345 when it has zero purpose. Well, make that one purpose. You can add “resources” to every list, which include a search engine friendly link to your favorite site! Since Listible is completely text (other than a logo), the search engines absolutely love it. Some pages are PR4-7 and you can put your link on all of them (so long as it is somewhat related). Otherwise you can make your own lists (some useful, some not). At any rate, more free PR4-7 links are always awesome so if you do not feel like spending $20-200/m on more links, go hit up Listible.

While Listible will be a great link building method for awhile, it already looks like it is getting a lot of porn spammers on it so do not expect this gravy train to stay. Until Google drops the hammer on this site, feel free to nuke it up with some of your links!

This is part 23 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate free guide on how to build massive amounts of links without paying one penny!

A lot of my readers have been giving me excellent feedback stating that they love my link building strategies that I give away in the link building cookbook. Link building is important because nearly every blog wants additional search engine traffic, and building links is the best way to get it. I thought I would feed everyone’s link building appetite by releasing yet another tip that you won’t see anyone else telling you.

Introduction to Flickr

Flickr is a free image hosting site that is now owned by Yahoo. It stores thousands of images and serves millions of visitors every month. Flickr allows users to make comments on the pictures that are uploaded by other users.

What few people realize however, is that Flickr allows you to post links inside the comments that are auto-approved, followed by the search engines, and even pass pagerank/authority. Flickr also allows you to use some HTML to pick your favorite anchor text that you are looking to rank for in the search engines.

Why should I build links with Flickr?

Flickr is a massive site and is growing at a rapid rate. Flickr is already a Google Pagerank 9 site, which means it is looked highly upon by the search engines. There are over 73,000,000 pages cached by Google on the site already. In other words, there are over 50,000,000 opportunities to get your blog noticed!

How can I build links with Flickr?

There are a few ways to do this. I will provide you with a few different options because I know that a lot of my readers prefer the ethical link building, while others prefer the “evil methods” that receive the maximum results.

Extremely Unethical Method

Browse around everywhere spamming comments with your link in them. The comments provide little value and are simply “copy/pasted” material with your HTML link embedded in it. You do not care if the person who uploaded the image removes your comment because you are simply going for quantity over quality.

Unethical Method

You make a lot of comments on random pictures you take little interest in. The comments you make are masked to sound like you truly care about the person when you couldn’t seriously give a damn. An example would be “Nice picture, do you mind if I use it over at my blog that shows you how to make money blogging?”

This would get a few people who would delete it as spam. The remaining people would think you are serious and reply back thanking you and giving you permission (or not) to use their work. You would then never bother using their pictures on your blog, but are just keeping the link from the Flickr page.

Ethical Method

Nearly the same as above, but you would only comment on the pictures that you would actually use in a blog post. I know a lot of bloggers that have a picture at the top of every blog post, and the majority of them find those pictures off Flickr. You could meet a lot of photographers and have permission to build those links, although there would certainly be fewer of them. You would get full permission to use their pictures on your blog as well, avoiding any copyright problems.

Recommended Tip

If you are a frequent Digg user, you should have noticed that a lot of the images that get popular and hit the homepage are from Flickr. This is because Digg users know that Flickr is owned by Yahoo and is on some huge high bandwidth servers. You can use this to your example and find the Flickr images that were made popular on Digg. This will result in you getting a Flickr link (good in itself), combined with a lot of strong links that will make that Flickr page have a high pagerank. Depending on how fast you are at getting these comments posted, you may even see a huge spike of traffic flock over to your blog.

Proof of Concept

I recently saw a photo from Flickr hit the frontpage of Digg (1500+ diggs so far) and thought I would use this as my case study. The Digg article is called “Frontpage with 19 Diggs?” The link to the Flickr photo is here.

By doing a quick backlink search on Yahoo, we can see that the Flickr page is fully cached/indexed and is one of the strongest links to the Digg page, excluding Digg linking to itself. A screenshot is posted below:

The next time Google updates their pagerank system, I am sure this Flickr page will have a decent pagerank from that Digg frontpage alone. Since it hit the frontpage about 6 days ago, your links might even receive traffic for the next three weeks while the Digg post is still ranking in the “recently popular in the last 30 days” section.

As a reminder, there are many more Flickr photos that are popular on Digg, and I recommend that you do the research yourself instead of commenting on the proof of concept I listed above. The reason behind this is that there are over three hundred people who will also be wanting to post their link, so it will definitely stand out if we all build links on the same page. There are over 50 million potential links, I am positive we can all find enough for ourselves!

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If you are like me, you have the hardest times finding great names for your new blog or startup. It seems like every single good .com domain name has already been registered and is not for sale. The reason is because there are tons of companies who register literally millions of domain names and stick Google advertisements all over them, hoping people will accidentally visit them. For every accidental type-in visitor that clicks an ad, it helps pay for the domain name. Domain Tasting is a concept that allows people to register a domain for 5 days, and if they do not see any traffic or clicks, they can return the domain and get their full money back. So on a bulk scale, people register 1,000,000 domains and only 10,000 make $1/day. They return the rest and now they have 10,000 domains earning them ~$300,000/m. This also would get rid of nearly all of the risk because they could sell back the domains they didn’t want after 5 days of “tasting” them.

Well according to an exclusive leak, Google may stop allowing advertisements to be displayed on any domain that is still in the “domain tasting” period. In the article, it states that since fewer domains will be monetized, we will all be paid more for the clicks we do receive. Now that is always nice, but I think the key is that there will be literally millions less domain names taken, which means we might have a chance at grabbing the names we want! This could also lead to a backlash though, because some people will register a new domain name and not be able to make money on it for nearly a week.

It will be interesting to see if this confidential informant’s leaks are true, and what effect it will have on the industry.