This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.