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Unasked is a service that is much like Yahoo Answers. Users of the site ask a question, and the other users of the site do their best to answer them. The more correct answers you give, the higher your “ranking” is on the website.

While you can post links when you answer your questions, they are 100% nofollow (just like Yahoo Answers), thus making answering questions useless for linking purposes. However, every question you answer links to your profile where you can set your own homepage with a dofollow anchor text link. If you want to build one more link to your site, sign up at Unasked.com and then answer a question or two so that your profile page will get indexed quickly, and enjoy the extra unique backlink.

Here is my unasked page.

This is part 26 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate link building resource on the web.

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.

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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