New search engine marketers typically don’t have it so easy. (Anecdotal Evidence Alert) I had two potential clients come to me this month, who I had to turn down because they were penalized. (I just don’t need the business that bad to hold their hands through the process) Both of these clients rented links from a “guaranteed first page rankings” type SEO firm. Giant blinking warning sign!!! Most SEO’s don’t make these promises for a simple reason: they have past results they can point to that will seal the deal without resorting to guarantees. Additionally, as an SEO consultant you never really know what the guy before you was doing to screw it up. Trust me. So straight to the do’s and don’ts of renting links.

How to Rent Links Effectively (If You Must)

To rent links effectively there are a few factors you must consider.

1. Links MUST Come From Relevant Pages. Common sense rules the day here. If your site is about donuts – rent links from sites about food. This is probably the most important rule. Google uses a form of Latent Semantic Indexing/Analysis which has a pretty good chance of figuring out if page A is relevant to page B.
2. If Possible Avoid Footer (or indeed header) Links The further away from the quality unique content of the page – the less likely they will pass any decent rankings. In addition this is likely a metric many search engines can detect. A list of links has a fairly easily detectable signature. Caveat: If you can get a footer link from a highly relevant, CLEAN page it may be worth pursuing.
3. Acquiring Links In Quality Content Works Best Links wrapped in a paragraph of real text is harder to detect, and therefore more likely to be seen as natural. I think this is a no-brainer so I won’t belabour the point. If you are looking for in content links, off the top of my head TLA has in text links and TLB has HMP’s
4. Link Velocity Matters If you gain too many links too fast, its easy for Google to detect. Slow and steady wins the race otherwise you look like an automated linking scheme.
5. Vary your anchor text Again, leaving too many markers for search engines to pick up = BAD.
6. DEEP LINK! You always want to maintain a natural looking link profile. Quality sites get deep links to subpages because they have legitimate quality content. This is the link profile you are going for.
7. Renting Works Best to Give a Small Boost to Important Rankings A few rented links on difficult keywords is a reasonable compliment to other less dangerous link building/attracting plans of attack. If renting is your only modus operandi, don’t say I didn’t weren’t warned when you are penalized.

The Big Players

There are quite a decent number of players in the link brokerage game. The two largest are text-link-ads.com and textlinkbrokers.com. Some slightly smaller players include Link Adage, TNX and Teliad. It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment here about any of these companies.

When building links SEOs often take into consideration metrics that Google and other search engines might use to determine if a site is actively trying to manipulate their results. Avoiding detection, or creating a natural link profile is commonly overlooked in the SEO business. In truth the metrics SEO’s use are often arbitrary and rely on ‘best guess’ approaches. It’s difficult to know for sure whether Google tries to detect manipulation algorithmically or what metrics it might employ, however one can put on their Google hat and make an educated guess as to what might be reasonable yardsticks to measure by.

Link Building Basics

Vary Your Anchor Text

While pursuing links from all of the above site’s is a worthwhile endeavor, no amount of artificially trying to appear natural makes much sense if you put a giant bullseye on your back by building links that all have the same anchor text. Varying up your anchor text on links you build, buy or rent is the safest way to go.

Vary Blog/Forum Platforms

Sure you may have found the latest and greatest way to slip nofollow free links past wordpress or drupal, but exclusively building links on one or two platforms looks a little suspicious wouldn’t you say? Just because a link isn’t passing linkjuice or keyword rankings, don’t automatically assume it’s worthless. Every link has some value, even if its just to diversify your portfolio.

Deep Link Your Site

If your site has 5,000 pages it might raise a red flag if all of your good anchor text rich links point to the homepage. Get around this by creating multiple keyword landing pages and deep link to them with a mix of anchor text.

Solicit Links from 0 PR Pages

Not every link that a site acquires over time comes from a PR 6 page. Typically the vast majority of pages that link to you organically will have 0 PR. Once again if all the pages that link to yours are from high PR pages, a spotlight could shine on your site.

Build Links Over Time

Most of this article has dealt with who to acquire links from and where those links point. A third equally important metric is the time it takes to acquire your links. Most sites don’t go from 0-60 overnight. A good linkbait article CAN do this for your site, however building links over time is the safest way to approach things.

Link Profile Metrics

Existing Tools

Several popular seo tools already list possible metrics. Aaron Wall’s SEO tool for example lists a site’s Whois, Technorati index, Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks as potential metrics. SEO Quake lists only a site’s whois and del.icio.us bookmarks. As del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking tool it makes sense that if Google uses any sites as metrics, del.icio.us bookmarks would be first on the list. However with so many social media networks, if you are investing time and money in building links; spreading your eggs across several baskets is the wise move to avoid detection and possible penalty.

These are some sites that we at Indexed Content feel are good candidates to pursue links from to build a natural link profile for your site:

• Digg.com – a site that has made the front page of digg is likely to receive good backlinks on its own, however sites that don’t have multiple pages submitted are not likely to be worthy of keyword rankings for difficult to rank terms
• Stumbleupon – sites with several reviews by diverse users seem like a good fit to have naturally acquired good backlinks
• Del.icio.us – the first and most popular social bookmarking tool, all del.icio.us links are nofollowed making them of dubious SEO quality which makes them a natural fit as an organic metric
• Google Bookmarks – A bookmarking tool from Google, and since Google has access to all the data, using it as a metric would be exceedingly easy
• Technorati – the prominent blog search, ranking, and notifier of new blog posts, not a natural fit for certain sites that don’t run blogs
• Wikipedia – the worlds largest human edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia is free for anyone to edit but getting links to stick isn’t easy unless your site has expert quality content that qualifies.
• Faves.com (formerly bluedot) – Another popular social bookmarking site that adds nofollows to links.
• Furl – A social bookmarking site
• Blogmarks – A social bookmarking site
• Blinklist – A social bookmarking site
• Yahoo’s MyWeb – A social bookmarking/social media tool from Yahoo! When Yahoo controls the data why wouldn’t they use it as a metric and reward sites that score well on their products?

Digg User Lookup

The Basics

To get started, you need to create (as in ‘out of thin air’) an application key and a user agent. There is no application key signup like Google or Youtube, however the application key you choose should meet the following requirements:

from the digg api wiki
The value of the appkey argument must be a valid absolute URI (see IETF RFC 2396) that identifies the application making the request. The URI might point to:

• The application itself, if it’s a web application.
• A web page describing the application.
• A web page offering the application for download.
• The author’s web site.

Html

The html for the form to display to request digg user name.

<form action="" method="post">
<table border="0">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2">User Lookup</td>
    </tr>
  </thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>User Name</td>
    <td>
  <input maxlength="50" name="uid" size="25" type="text" /></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td><input name="submit" type="submit" value="submit" /></td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>

Code

The backend code to function the submit request

decode($response);
        foreach($decoded->users as &$user) {
             // $user = $decoded->users;
                $name = $user->name;
                $icon = $user->icon;
                $registered = $user->registered;
                $profileviews = $user->profileviews;
                              function timestamp_to_date ($registered)
                              {
                              $date = date ('m-d-Y' , $registered);
                              echo $date;
                              }
                echo "<div id=\"archivebox\">";
                echo "<h2><img src="\" alt="" />";
                echo "$name";
                echo "User Since: ";
                timestamp_to_date ($registered);
                echo "";
                echo "Profile Views: $profileviews ";
                echo "</h2><h3>User Links</h3>";
                echo "<ul>";
                }
                foreach($user->links as $link) {
                $href = $link->href;
                $description = $link->description;
                echo "<li><a href="$href">$description</a></li>";
                }
                echo "</ul>";
                echo "</div>";

        } else {             //form hasn't been submitted
        $user = "elebrio";
	require("JSON.php");
	ini_set('user_agent', 'ic/1.0');
	$appkey = 'http://indexedcontent.com';
        $response = file_get_contents("http://services.digg.com/user/$user?appkey=$appkey&type=json");
        $json = new Services_JSON();
	$decoded = $json->decode($response);
        foreach($decoded->users as &$user) {
             // $user = $decoded->users;
                $name = $user->name;
                $icon = $user->icon;
                $registered = $user->registered;
                $profileviews = $user->profileviews;
                              function timestamp_to_date ($registered)
                              {
                              $date = date ('m-d-Y' , $registered);
                              echo $date;
                              }
                echo "<div id=\"archivebox\">";
                echo "<h2><img src="\" alt="" />";
                echo "$name";

                echo "User Since: ";
                timestamp_to_date ($registered);
                echo "";
                echo "Profile Views: $profileviews ";
                echo "</h2><h3>User Links</h3>";
                echo "<ul>";
                }
                foreach($user->links as $link) {
                $href = $link->href;
                $description = $link->description;
                echo "<li><a href="$href">$description</a></li>";
                }
                echo "</ul>";
                echo "</div>";
		}
?>

In order to get this code working on your site, you will need to change two variables.

• appkey – replace with your domain

   $appkey ='http://indexedcontent.com';

• user agent

   ini_set('user_agent', 'ic/1.0');

  ic/1.0 is my site’s current user agent. You can basically name this whatever you want.

Additional Resources

• http://groups.google.com/group/diggapi

Some people say that this would be some sort of bad luck because the traffic doesn’t convert well and certainly your site will crash due to high traffic (yea right) …

I think there are way many better (if not only) advantages for your site if you get articles on the first page of digg because:

Seo Advantages: You can get a lot of links (deep links) to your site with anchor texts that really do the job because of sites who use the digg mirror service or others who compose their articles reffering to you etc. Let’s not forget about other sites that collaborate with Digg or users who use more than one social bookmarking site thus giving you tons of backlinks.

Monetizing Ads: Even though your ads won’t convert as you would want them a huge traffic spike could earn you some decent money. Altough your traffic increased 20 times and your winnings barely tripled it’s still a progress no doubt about it.

Exposure: Having your story on the first page gives you great exposure. Basically all viral campaigns made it to the first page on Digg so if you have something to say why not do it the smart way

Readers: Everybody knows John Chow and what he did, how he monetized his sites, pissed off Digg and Google etc… But the smart thing i guess nobody though of was converting Digg fans into his own. This shows us that if you have some talent (when it comes to writing) you can easily convert readers and make them your own. Guess how the first page of Digg helps in this equation

So most people who say that Digg is this or that or fear of a server crash are just “little girls” who never experienced real traffic and of course they fear it. My logical piece of advice is get as much (content oriented if possible) traffic as you can get !

P.S. If you do find the secret of placing your article on #1 page of Digg don’t forget to whisper