7 Places to Get Backlinks and Build Blog Authority

By Chris BerryBlogging

For online marketers, blog promotion is all about link building. Well, mostly. No matter what you do, your ultimate goal should be to get more links to boost authority of your blog.

As you may already know, that helps your search engine rankings and also get you referral traffic from the originating sites or blogs.

Note: Before building links, it helps if you optimize your blog first. Fortunately, nowadays most of the work is just one time process. Although keyword research and content production are on-going activities. You can read more about this in my guide on Whitehat SEO for blogs.

In this blog post, let’s focus on getting traffic and increasing authority from search engine standpoint.

1. Other blogs
Blogging is about communication and interaction. Most blogs have enabled comments feature, so you may be able to participate and leave your comment. Don’t underestimate blogs with nofollow, they may send you potential traffic too. People who have seen what you have to say and click through are nothing but interested readers.

Guest blogging and link baiting are two other methods to get backlinks from blogs.

2. Forums (discussion boards)
The thing about links from forums or discussion boards is not about transferring authority by spamming the forums with as many posts as possible. The signature link at the bottom of each of your contribution is a chance to get your blog seen, but…

Building credibility in the forums is very important if you want to get other forum regulars to click and go to your blog.

3. PR sites
Press release is still an effective way to not only reach out to other media, but also to get inbound links from high authority sites.

Nowadays, the value of the links makes bloggers use it solely for link building. The extra exposure is a bonus. Done right, exposures certainly are more valuable but those can be hard to achieve if you have no experience in pitching a story to editors.

4. News sites
Getting into New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other huge news sites is a dream come true for all bloggers, but you may not start at that level.

There are lots of smaller news sites that are hungry for stories and may accept submission. Getting your own weekly column and bringing steady stream of traffic and backlinks to your site are not as hard as you think. After all, you are already a writer for your blog.

5. Directories
Directories, blog specific or not, are still great for inbound links. If you can get into DMOZ, or can afford Yahoo directory, they may help boost the authority of your blog.

Forget about the traffic from directories. Most of them won’t send you many visitors, but they are still great for backlinks.

6. Social media sites
Social media are all the rage nowadays. While some of them start to put nofollow attribute to the a tag, they may still worth the effort.

Social bookmarking sites, for instance, have the potential to send you hundreds, if not thousands, of unique visitors overnight. Generally, they have short attention span though. You may not be able to turn them into customers or make them click on the ads because they are quite savvy.

Despite what others have said about social media sites, there are ways to make use of this type of traffic. At the very least, it may help you increase page views, which is good for advertisers who appreciate branding.

7. .edu and .gov sites
These sites deserve their own mention because search engines weight links from these TLDs (top level domains) more than others. Some SEO experts may disagree, and it may at best be a small difference.

But still, getting links from these sites, especially those with aged domains and high authority can only mean good things. If nothing else, consider those links as a balance for your link network or profile across multiple TLDs.

I know there are more sites for blog promotion and to get inbound links. If you have others in mind, feel free to share with us. Also, what are your favorites?

14 thoughts on “7 Places to Get Backlinks and Build Blog Authority”

  1. I have been using all the above mentioned methods for backlinks.
    You can write quality articles and post it in various article directories.
    Commenting on blogs is well and good if and only if comments you are posting are useful and relevant.You have to find blogs in your niche for commenting.
    Forum postings with signatures is good but we need to find do follow forums .For the forum posting to appear as a backlink to your site takes time as it depends upon when the search engines indexes it.
    Directory submissions are nowadays in less use but not to be ignored as you get traffic to your site.
    Getting a link from .edu and .gov is good as they have a very high PR,but why will they link to a site that has less or no PR at all.
    The above mentioned are obviously the ones to get backlinks,but how tdo we really target them

  2. thanks!
    You made some good points there. I

    did a search on the topic and found

    most people will agree with your

    blog.It will greatly help me in my

    SEO

    activities.

  3. could you list out some press release sites which can give a dofollow link? Also isnt good original content good enough for link juice? Does it contribute or is it only a hunt for backlinks?

  4. We always hear of the best places to build links i.e forums, blogs, directories etc, etc. But a list of websites that you can build links quicker would help much more than just telling people the same thing over and over again. I haven’t found ONE decent article on link building for the past year – the one page that was an excellent reference has now disappeared hence the reason I keep looking!

    Anyone have some DIFFERENT ideas that can actually make a difference? Thanks in advance…

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  8. I thought the general consensus was that directories, except for a select few, were pretty much useless these days. G put the smack down them a while back and I thought that pretty much killed most directories usefulness.

  9. There are sites like slashdot.org , even though they can’t bring much traffic,but definitely will give good back links. snugd.com one of them.

  11. Ok let me make it clear. First and foremost, I said it may…

    Secondly, yes, I do recall reading about it. However, a lot of SEO treat it with skepticism because if you look at big sites who rank on top of search engines for very competitive keywords, they almost always have links from .gov and .edu.

    With that said, I also followed it with…

    “If nothing else, consider those links as a balance for your link network or profile across multiple TLDs.”

    So, if you don’t want to believe .gov and .edu are special, go ahead. Just that when given a choice between a link from .edu or .com, same PR, same topic, etc., I’d always choose .edu.

  12. … although I think everyone agrees that .gov and .edu tend to have more authority and less spam than other TLDs.

  13. By some SEO experts may not agree would you also include Matt Cutts of Google? He has publicly denounced that any TLDs are weighted over others. Most .edu and .gov sites are typically have natural authority so there is not reason to give the extension a cart blanche bonus.

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