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.