When I’m on a quest to manually build relevant links, there are a couple tricks I employ. One such trick is what I call the “recent comments” trick. Oooooooh, fancy.

Let’s say I need to build some relevant links for my marbles site. My bad ass marbles site. Obviously, I want to drop as many links as possible in as little time as possible. Doing it manually ensures that the vast majority will stick, but it can also be slow as molasses.

So, what I do is execute a quick google search for “marbles” “recent comments”. Note that each keyword is in its own quotes yet in the same query.

Basically what you’re looking for are blogs with a sidebar widget that displays the most recent comments, along with links back to the author’s site (if any). If the blog has 400 pages of unique content, and those little crawlers just happen to come by while your link is there (good chance they will), then you get a butt-load of backlinks.

Be aware that not every page with the text “recent comments” is going to have what you’re looking for. Fairly often you’ll come across something like “recent comments from marble enthusiast Dwight Fiddlerbachen suggest…” bla bla bla. Similarly, people using this method may very well end up on this site due to the title of this article. Sorry, guys.

If you’d like to narrow it down even further and only look for do-follow blogs, then that’s another story. But, as far as I’m concerned, I’d much rather have 400 no-follow backlinks with proper anchor text than one crummy do-follow backlink.

I hold “no follow” in a similar regard as the alleged 1969 moon landing.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a decent piece of software to aid you in the manual link building process, check out Fast Blog Finder.

Peace be with you.

You may already know that I love me some Wickedfire. I just thought I’d post here in case you haven’t stopped by that Gay Webmaster Forum lately, because there is a pretty hilarious thread dedicated to Warrior Forum “guru” Kim Standerline that you don’t want to miss. Will this result in an epic forum war? I sure hope so.

Edit:

Dang, two posts deleted?

Sorry guys. I had no choice but to remove this post as well as one other dealing with a similar subject matter. I’ll try to make up for it with quality future posts.

If you have any questions look for me on AIM at: offwhitehat.

Because I know someone is going to mention it, yes I understand that wikipedia’s external links are no-followed. However, I believe in the significance of no-follow about as much as I believe in the significance of Captain Planet. Moving on…

In case you’ve been living under a rock (with no wi-fi), the beauty of wikipedia is that most all pages can be edited by anybody. Of course, this makes it a substantially less credible resource than many people believe it to be, but the search engines absolutely love it. Google in particular attributes a hefty amount of rank to thousands of wikipedia pages.

It is in your best interests to have a link to your site(s) from a wikipedia page, especially a prominent one. Not only will it bring in varying amounts of referral traffic, but it can also provide a huge boost in ranking. You can lecture about no-follow attributes until you’re blue in the balls, but I’ve tested this on quite a few sites and the results are always positive (providing you use proper anchor text and you can get the link to stick)…

Your Enemy
Close cousins of the Craigslist flaggers, wikipedia editors take great pride in their thankless work. Try adding a link to your poker site on the wikipedia page for poker and see how fast it is removed by some anonymous cyber hall monitor, and then you’ll have a better understanding of this obstacle. What they don’t like are links to sites full of advertisements or affiliate links/products. What they do like are “resource” sites (i.e. sites that appear to provide free information).

Your Solution
Your link is most likely to be audited within hours or even minutes of your posting it. Simply remove the ads on the page you’re linking to, make sure there is relevant info there (pertaining to the page you just linked it from), and let it sit that way for a day or two. After it has stuck for a couple days, it’s safe to say it’s not likely to be removed for a while. At this point you could do one of two things:

1. Leave it alone and hope visitors click through to other monetized pages on your site.
2. Monetize the poop out of it.

Of course, on VERY high profile wikipedia pages, links are checked more often than others, so the lifespan of #2 may be limited. However, I’ve got nicely rooted wikipedia links that have been up for months that regularly push traffic to pages on my sites with ads/aff links, etc.

If you’re still skeptical about the power of wikipedia links, you should probably try it for yourself and see what happens. Remember to use whatever anchor text you’re trying to rank for whenever possible, but try to keep it looking legit. Ahite?

A lot of networks are fond of giving gifts to reward their top affiliates. Common gifts include gift cards, TVs, the occasional hooker, etc.

But Smaxor over at Ads4Dough really took it up a notch this time.

I was minding my own business, talking about apple cider on IRC, when all of a sudden I hear a knock at the door. Lo and behold, Smaxor himself, along with a hired driver. I knew it must be important if he was willing to drive three hours and meet me in person. Naturally I assumed a felony conviction must be somewhere in my future. Boy was I wrong!

In the envelope he handed me were the keys to a new Mercedes Benz! I was a little disappointed at first since it’s only a C-class, but Smaxor explained that what with the economy and everything, they couldn’t really go all out for small time guys like me. I think I’ve sent around 10 leads through them so far this year.

Anyway, here it is:

The girl wasn’t with them, she just showed up as I was posing for the picture. It’s actually a really funny story how she happened to be in my neighborhood. I’d have her tell it here herself but she’s in the shower right now. Maybe I’ll save that for a later post.

Ads4Dough rocks!

If you’re not already familiar with phpbay, I’ll give you a moment to slap yourself.

Go on. Right in the face.

Phpbay is an incredibly useful WordPress plugin (API is also available) that allows you to display relevant ebay listings on your websites to earn a commission. In order to use it, you’ll need to be signed up with the Ebay Partner Network. Some people have reported difficulty getting approved by EPN, but there are alternatives available. You can also join the Ebay affiliate program through the Pepperjam Network.

There’s a reason you’ve heard about Phpbay so much around various internet marketing portals: it’s awesome. But instead of just praising it like a lunatic in hopes that you will purchase it through one of my sneakily masked affiliate links, I will instead give you some other useful info that I myself use that will make your phpbay stores even more awesomer.

Ebay Search Results
Depending on the nature of your site, a lot of times users will land on your site and not realize that you’re simply serving them eBay results. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing. However, they may try to search for items that you don’t have listings for on your site. If you just have a regular old wordpress sidebar search bar, it’s not going to find what they are looking for unless you’ve included matching content on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to display ebay results on your site that match their query?

All you have to do is go into search.php and replace some code. Starting with the line:

Delete everything up to:

(including that string) Replace with the following code:

Ta-da. That piece of code is brought to you by Wade himself, creator of PhpBay Pro.

In some cases, your particular theme may not have a search.php, but rather a searchform.php. I have not yet devised a way to make this work with this sort of rogue theme, but as soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

Make the Entire Listing Clickable
By default, only the text of your phpbay listings are clickable. Poo on that. Why not make the whole thing clickable? Depending on whether or not you are displaying results in rows or columns, you will need to make the following adjustment to the respective file.

If you’re using row results, you’ll want to edit the file called template.ebay.results, which is located in the “templates” folder inside the phpbay plugin folder. The original file looks like this:

The new, edited file should look like this:

Now, for those of you using column results, you’ll want to be editing template.column.results, located in the same place as the other template file. The original file will look like this:

Go ahead and replace all that with the following code:

There you have it. Now your auction results are completely clickable. Mo’ clicks = mo’ money. But beware, mo’ money = mo’ problems.

Removing Icons
On some sites, I like to go the extra mile to minimize the ebayness of the results displayed. To do this, I simply remove those pesky icons that are so reminiscent of ebay. I almost always get rid of the “But it Now” icons, and I sometimes get rid of the paypal logo. To do so is really simple. You’ll need to edit the same files talked about above, except all you’ll need to do is delete the line of code that calls that particular icon.

In template.ebay.results, you’ll see a string of text that says:

Deleting that line entirely will remove the paypal logo from your listings and not adversely affect anything else. Similarly, deleting:

will effectively remove the bid/buy it now logo.

In template.column.results, you’d simply need to delete

to remove the paypal logo, and so on and so forth.

In a future post I’ll go into detail about how to construct your Phpbay sites in such a way to minimize your bounce rate and maximize your CTR. But for now, it is time to open another bottle of Martinelli’s award winning apple cider.