Organizing Your Link Sources for More Effective Promotion
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Ok. So for whitehat and grayhat projects, there is an eternal scramble for links. After getting tired of hunting down message boards and blog posts recently, I decided to organize all the data. Holy crap, it makes a huge difference.
This works for blackhats, whitehats, grayhats, and anyone else. As long as you’re doing decent scale.
Prequisites
Write up some quick scripts that go through and pull out the basic structures of common CMS’s. So for Wordpress, pull out categories/tags. For pligg (Social News Site), pull out the listed categories. For messageboards, pull out the forum names. For directories, pull out the list of categories. For all of them, pull out the title and the homepage data. For the text on the homepage, strip out the Javascript, CSS, and HTML tags with a regular expression.
For smaller scale, you can enter these manually I suppose.
- The MySQL Setup - These columns are what I’m using. Change it according to your needs and abilities
- Columns
- URL - The url of the possible link source.
- CMS - Is it a blog? Messageboard? Pligg? Article submission site?
- FOLLOW - Boolean variable. Is it no-follow or do-follow links? It’s hard to figure out if the links are dofollow or no-follow, so allow a null value for this. Or just check the pages to see if the term “nofollow” even shows up, and grade based on that.
- IS_FREE - Used primarily for directories. Is it a free link submission, or a manual one?
- PAGERANK - If you don’t want to use pagerank, replace this with a inbound link count.
- PAGE_DATA - The homepage text. Good for searching for your keyphrases.
- KEYWORDS - This is a big list of all the various categories that the site has. Aka all the stuff you mined out with your scripts, or by hand.
- SITE_UNAME - Your username for this particular site. Saves a LOT of registration time.
- SITE_PW -Your password for this particular site
- Columns
Why Does this Help so Much?
Just adding good links to bookmarks is sloppy, and frequently not very targeted. Remember that the difference between “link spam” and “link building” is largely just the relevance of the link. So by making it easier for us to get our links dropped. Beyond that, storing our accounts centrally makes it so we don’t have to recreate one or sit there guessing for a long time. Also, a profile with more than one post/submission is quite useful; we get more trust from the site.
How Is this Used?
Let’s say you’re doing a site on acne medication. You create a simple little script for building the query, and end up executing this:
SELECT url, site_uname, site_pw FROM links_db WHERE ((data LIKE ‘%medic%’ OR data LIKE ‘%acne%’ OR data LIKE ‘%skin%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%health%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%pharm%’) OR (keywords LIKE ‘%medic%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%acne%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%skin%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%health%’ OR keywords LIKE ‘%pharm%’)) AND CMS=’MessageBoard’ ORDER BY pagerank DESC
Voila. You’ve got yourself a list of messageboards(complete with username and password) that have something to do with your desired topic. Time saved is the search, finding ones that were NOT what you were looking for and the registration. But that’s not all….
Automating It
This part is a little more blackhat obviously. But let’s say you’ve got something that will automatically post to one of these scripts you have. It’s easy to have it pull the urls/usernames/passwords from this database, and post your link/message to them.
Other Advantages
Does anyone here outsource their link development? Yeah you know who you are. Why not create a lovely backend for your indian workers so that they can do their submissions according to your specifications? The time saved would probably be pretty significant, especially if it’s separated by CMS, and have the accounts already registered for them. In addition, it’d be pretty easy to build something in so that they can report back where the link was dropped, and you can monitor it yourself to make sure it sticks.
Yeah I know I was slacking off lately for entries. But I liked this one 
Enjoy.
-XMCP
February 17th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I like this post. My shit is all over the place in various files. a central db would be key
February 17th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
It’s all about tracking the work.
-OT
February 17th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
This looks relevant..
Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identify_top_blogs.php
February 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
This is what my system looks like, more or less. However, you probably want to break the table up into multiple tables — for instance, I keep my usernames and passwords, log in URL and other metadata that I need for automated login in a separate table so I can have 2, 3, 4 or 400 usernames per site.
An interesting problem is what the scope of a ’site’ is. For instance, you might be looking at competitor backlinks and find that your competitor is in somebody’s blogroll, so there are 500 links from site A to site B, but only one person responsible for them. On the other hand, you might see 500 links from del.icio.us, and 500 different people are responsible for them.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Haven’t thought of this earlier, will try to experiment to automate this and see what results I get.
Thanks for the great info XMCP (when will we get to know your name :P, or will I have to do some research :P).
February 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I’d track the home page’s PageRank as well as the linking page’s PageRank. The former can help you determine if the linking page will one day be of value even if it currently has no PageRank.
If you’re going down the path of a truly normalized database, then MySQL is good. However, if you’ve got just one table, I’d argue that you can get much of the same benefit with Excel. The latest version supports 1 million rows. Easier to share if need be.
February 19th, 2008 at 1:52 am
I’m afraid that if Shady were to tell you what XMCP meant, he’d have to kill you…lol. The man is pure legend is all I’ll say
February 19th, 2008 at 2:12 am
Haha I must admit, Dev is right. Although I can at least say my real name(if not what my nick means). Mike. Or Michael. Whichever strikes your fancy.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:34 am
An Excel spreadsheet with the above mentioned columns and a filter functionality can also be a big help, if you just do a bit of link building manually from time to time.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I seem I all have so far is that you are named Michael and that you are 19 years old
February 19th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Lots of people use Excel to manage manual link building campaigns. It’s a fine tool for that.
It does take some work to make a user interface to manage your campaigns in mysql, but the advantage is you get one system to combine manual and automatic activities — both at the information gathering end and at the link building end.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Wow Mike, atleast you’re more comfortable with divulging your first name. To be honest folks, there’s not much you can find in the SERPs even with his last name..
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
[…] Mike explains a completely whitehat method of keeping track of your links for your completely [not] whitehat link du…. He’s gives us great examples of looking at things from high view…subscribe to his feed […]
February 29th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
[…] Organizing Your Link Sources for More Effective Promotion […]
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:33 am
It looks good, but does it really works?