Building quality, one way links to your website can be difficult, time consuming and frustrating. It is generally agreed that the best way to build links is to build them gradually over time, relying on natural links to your original, frequently updated content. There are, however, a few shortcuts to building up links. They are not easy ways to make your site popular, nor are they guaranteed to work for everybody. They are simply some casual tips to help you obtain a few quality inbound links.

Submit Articles to Digg

Google absolutely loves Digg. The site is spidered very frequently and the domain has a lot of authority in terms of link building. Even stories with no diggs will still be spidered, so long as there is a navigational path for the spiders to use to reach it. Google cannot use the number of diggs as any sort of authority when ranking a URL, yet…

For the best long term effects only submit good quality articles to Digg. Or better yet, let your users submit the articles that they think are worthwhile. You will quickly get a reputation as a spammer if you keep posting unpopular content.

Other Social Networking sites

Submitting to social bookmarking and social networking sites can be hot and miss for some people.

Some social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Twitter use “nofollow” on their links so they cannot influence rankings. Other sites, such as Furl, do not.

Having your links on a few social network profiles may also be useful in building up the number of links. For others it is simply not worth it. While some, such as Facebook, do use “nofollow” on their links, some do not. However, the weight that these links carry is relatively low, despite the authority these domains actually carry.

“Widgetbait”

“Widgetbait” is a term thrown around for an object that is added to a user’s website or blog. This item features a link back to the author’s website. If the object is installed on many thousands of websites, this results in many thousands of backlinks. The classic examples of widgetbait include online quizzes, IQ tests or horoscopes.

While these links are valuable to some, for others the quality of the link and the traffic it brings is just too low. If the text of the link bears no relation to the page in which it is contained, Google becomes suspicious. Additionally, the text that links back to the site must relate to the widget, and, the link must go back to the author’s website, not a third party site. A classic example of spammy widgetbait would be an IQ test that features a text link to an online dating site. Google would soon hear of this and the sites involved, including the sites distributing the widget and the site being linked to would be penalised.

The Best Kind of WidgetBait: Just Build Something Useful

The best type of widgetbait is to simply create something that people want to use. Classic examples of this are Winamp Skins, modifications for forum software such as Invision Power Board and plugins or themes for WordPress. Why are these good ideas? They will result in you being listed on the official website of each respective product. These sites are popular and the links they feature carry a lot of influence.