Backlink Experiments / Update 1/27/2015

I realize that I haven't been contributing very much to this blog as of late, so I decided that I would get this last post out tonight and bring everyone up to speed with the things I am currently working on. The gardening blog is doing well. I am currently in the process of writing some KILLER content that I can use to get backlinks.


Backlinking is a real challenge that can really occupy a large amount of your time. The process I am using right now, is to ask fellow bloggers in my niche a specific question, then I am compiling a "giant" list of answers, and everyone gets credit that participated (in form of a link) and then they will hopefully link back to me. I have scored a couple of high DA / PA links this way, right off of blogger in fact. I also scored some Wordpress.com links which are always high DA as well.

I want to let you in on a secret about backlinks that a lot of people fail to tell you. When you get a link from a site, or if you even payed for someone to run a program and generate a lot of links for you, you have to really pay attention to what you are doing. Just because they linked to your site, doesn't mean that you are necessarily going to see any benefit (or any determent either). You need to be sure when you are checking your backlinks that:

1. Your link is indeed "dofollow"
2. That there aren't TONS of other links on the page.
3. That your backlink, is indexed by Google. 

That last part is very important.  That's the part they fail to tell you, especially if you are paying for links on a place like Fiverr.  You can get 40,000 links for around 10 dollars, but they are all garbage links, and 99% of them wont index, and the ones that do get index will actually hurt you.

Photo Credit:

   by  Frederick Md Publicity 

If you do choose Fiverr, you need to look for people that do pyramid building, and manual .edu and .gov sites.  They are going to give you the best results and have the best chance of getting indexed.

Another service I am using to get backlinks is through social media bookmarking.  There is a service called SocialADR that will submit your bookmarks to over 25 social media sites at once. It is really powerful because each time you submit something, it gets posted by a different user, so the bookmarks are going up all over the world in a very natural way. I currently pay for the 20.00 a month program which gives me enough credits and bookmarks to handle my small amount of websites. You may wish to purchase more if you have more sites, or if you have clients. I spoke with the customer service at SocialADR today, and they told me that the sites take about 1 month to get indexed. They said that they "ping" each url once a day, and they also use an automated indexing too. I don't know what the success rate is, but I will let you know in about a month when I can see if I either got backlinks that are dofollow from high PA and DA social bookmarking sites, or if it was a failure. I think for 20 bucks it was worth a shot to try for the backlinks. The actual traffic you receive from the bookmarks is really small.

The Grim Truth about Crowd Sourcing and Astroturf!

by Robert Leavitt

Well you may ask yourself how Crowd Sourcing and Astro Turf go together in a sentance!  First lets define each:

Crowd Sourcing is a type of employment where people hire employees (via the internet) to perfom small tasks that can't be accomplished by a computer in most cases.  They could be searching for a website, clicking certain links, or signing up for a service.

Astroturf is artifical grass that was originaly used in the "Astrodome" in Houston, TX as a place to play baseball that required no ground maintenance.  Another advantage was the ability to play in any weather condition.

Now, these two terms refer to people using Crowd Sourcing as a way to "Astroturf" certain websites by giving them "fake roots" and manipulating search engine results.

As some of you know I was a microworkers employee for a long period of time, and I have completed many many tasks.  I started to notice some patterns emerging.  For example there were several tasks that always asked you to go the site.  They will post a picture on a picture host server and it will have the name of the site painted into it, so it's not identifiable to a spider crawling the web.  Then once on that page, you will search inside that page for a list of advertisements.  Then you are asked to click the advertisement.

I have seen many variations of the above task, but they all share a couple of things in common.

• You are never asked to search for the site in google.
• You will enter the site from another site, usually facebook or something like that to make it appear like legitimate traffic.
• You usually conduct a search while in the page, though not always.
• You are asked to click an advertisement.

At first this seemed harmless to me, and some of the people were paying a decent amount to do this fast task ($0.15 - $0.25 a task for a matter of seconds).  In fact I used to look for these tasks exclusively as they are highly profitable for the worker.

Yesterday I applied for an adSense account to help monetize my fertilizer blog.  I figured that i could use the ad revenue to help pay for hosting costs, etc... After I filled in the details and I got to the end, I started to read the Terms of Service (TOS) for adSense.  I was absolutely shocked to find that paying someone to click your links is an outright violation of the TOS.

So why do they continue to allow it?  Why wouldn't Google try to sue microworers and other sites like it?  I don't have the answer to this question, and I know that microworkers is based in Europe somewhere.  It's really kind of sad how much manipulation there is out there in World Wide Web.

It's a dog eat dog world out there.  What are your thoughts?

You can learn more about Robert Leavitt on his Google Plus page.