Updated 26th July 2016
Everybody knows that quality backlinks pointing to your site are essential for SEO. If you want to rank well in the search engines, the main thing you need, apart from great content, and proper optimisation, is quality backlinks from high-ranking sites.
But how do you get them?
1 – The Field Of Dreams approach: Produce epic content and then everybody will link to you naturally… Well, good luck with that one! It will work in the end (probably), but who’s got that long to wait.
2 – Produce epic content (again), and do an outreach campaign to influential people in your market, asking them to link to you. That’s the current ‘state of the art’ in linkbuilding for SEO.
Two problems with that:
Firstly, it’s not that easy to produce ‘epic’ content. It takes an awful lot of work, maybe several days worth, just to create one piece.
Or you may need to build links to content that isn’t really linkworthy, or in areas where there are no influencers. Outreach doesn’t work in those situations.
And secondly, can you imagine how many requests the big influencers get every day? Every hour…
Neil Patel never even thanked me for the Lamborghini I sent him.
And even the very talented and extremely good looking Brian Dean from Backlinko, who always replies to my emails, has never given me a link yet (it’s not too late Brian…).
What’s the solution?
Why, do it yourself of course, don’t rely on others to do it for you.
Create your own backlinks
Ok, that sounds good in theory, but how do I do that? I don’t have any other sites of my own I can link from, and I don’t want to create one of those spammy PBN private blog networks, even though everybody tells me they still work. Black Hat stuff just isn’t cool, and I don’t want to risk it.
Surely you can’t create your own backlinks on other people’s sites? Not good quality ones anyway…
Well actually, yes you can.
And these are not just any old sites. We’re talking about some of the biggest sites on the internet.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Google… need I go on?
All of these sites, and many others, will allow you to create your own high-authority backlinks to your site.
Ok, it’s not too hard to imagine that you can probably go to one of these sites, create a page or a profile, and chuck a link to your site on it.
Will that make much of a difference to your rankings?
Probably not.
You need to do a bit more than just throw a link up. You need to create a proper, high-quality, and relevant presence on the site, and then put your link within it.
These are some of the biggest sites on the internet that are linking to you. Treat them with respect.
Do it properly, spend a bit of time on it, and craft a great page on these sites before you add your link.
Fill-in all the information, as appropriate to each particular site. Add some relevant text, add your bio, post some photographs, FAQs, link to other useful resources — whatever is appropriate to that site.
Your goal here is to create something that is relevant to your link, to make your link more powerful. Try and get as much relevant content onto each page as possible, so your link is contextual.
The next thing is to create links between all these sites. Sort of like a PBN, only it’s not private, it’s public.
In fact let’s call it a Public Site Network (PSN). I always wanted to put a word into the English language!
So if you put a video on YouTube, then you must link to it from Facebook, add it to your LinkedIn profile, post it on Pinterest, bookmark it on Digg, etc.
And vice versa, so that all these pages themselves have backlinks. Which makes them, and therefore, your link, more powerful.
So the principle is:
- Create relevant content on the page to make the link contextual
- Link them all to each other to boost their authority
Apply this principle to all the following sites. Although the specifics will vary greatly from site to site, the principle remains the same for all of them:
32 High PA sites where you can create backlinks
We’ll start with the obvious (and huge) ones. You may already have backlinks from some or all of these. Hopefully you have, in which case your task now is to review the page your link is on, and make sure it follows the principles above.
Is your Twitter profile complete? Does your Facebook page have lots of relevant content? Now is the time to work through them all and make sure.
If the first few sites look too obvious (huh, everybody knows that!), keep going down the list — I guarantee there will be some you don’t know or aren’t using when you could be.
(If you DO already have a link from every single site on this list, drop me a line and I’ll send you a Lamborghini too).
1 – YouTube (www.youtube.com)
Create a Youtube Channel. No videos of your own? No problem, you can share other people’s (but do create at least one of your own too, it’s easy – see below). Make sure that the videos you put on your channel are relevant to your link. Your link goes in the ‘About’ page for your channel. Again, make sure there is plenty of relevant content in your about page — a good 300 words or so. You can also add your link in the description of your videos. You can put links in comments also, so make sure you add some, and again make them relevant.
2 – Facebook (www.facebook.com)
You hopefully already already have a Facebook Fan Page/Business Page. If not, create one at once — have you been living under a stone for the last 6 years! Put your link on the Page, and also you can add it to any posts or comments you make on your own Page or other people’s Pages.
3 – Twitter (twitter.com)
You can put two links in your Twitter page — one in the ‘website’ field, and another one in the description. And they don’t have to be the same. If you’re not sure how to setup a Twitter profile properly, there’s an excellent guide here, written by, oh yes, me!
4 – Google+ (plus.google.com)
Although Google+ never took off as the gamechanging social network it was supposed to be, it’s still a powerful source of backlinks. Put them in your Profile page, and also in individual posts. Backlinks from Google — nice!
5 – Pinterest (pinterest.com)
You can get Backlinks from your profile page, and from Pins that you post. Pinterest is huge at the moment. And like all these sites, you can get a lot of traffic from it, as well as backlinks.
6 – LinkedIn (linkedin.com)
LinkedIn is HUGE. Not just for a very high-authority backlink, but also for the traffic you can get from within the site. It does require a bit of specialist knowledge to setup your LinkedIn profile properly, and hands down the best person I know to tell you how to do this is Mirna Bacun. Follow her guide to setting up your LinkedIn profile and score yourself not just a high quality backlink, but probably also a lot of traffic too.
7 – SlideShare (slideshare.net)
SlideShare is a presentation-sharing platform owned by LinkedIn. Just create a short presentation or two, and put your links inside. They don’t need to be long, or complicated — you could just take some bullet points from a blog post for example, and turn them into a quick PowerPoint presentation.
Ana Hoffman has a superb article on how to do this, it’s much easier than you think. And you can get a lot of traffic from SlideShare too, as well as a link. Whatever you do, don’t miss this one out. An now, once you’ve made your presentation, you can turn it into a video and upload it to your YouTube channel — voila, two links!
8 – Reddit (reddit.com)
Another site that can send you massive traffic if you do it right. The way to get your link here is to create your own relevant subreddit, and post your links, along with some relevant text in the column on the right. You can also post links in comments on other subreddits, which can send you tons of traffic in a heartbeat, but be very careful. Read, and scrupulously obey, the guidelines and make sure you engage with the community before posting any links.
9 – Vimeo (vimeo.com)
Now you have the video of your presentation that you made for YouTube, you can also share it here. Put a link in your profile, and also in any video as that you post.
10 – Vube (vube.com)
Another video sharing site where you can put a backlink on your About page.
11 – Flickr (flickr.com)
Yet another huge site where you can get backlinks. Just share some photographs, and you can put backlinks in your profile, and in the descriptions too. You could use product photographs, blog post headers, pictures from social media posts, even a picture of you — it doesn’t matter! Flickr also does video too, so post that video that you made for YouTube here as well. It’s coming in handy, that little video isn’t it? Well worth the couple of hours it took to make it.
12 – Tumblr (tumblr.com)
Tumblr is a massive high domain authority blogging site. Create a free blog (takes minutes), and you can share as many links as you like. As with all of these things, just a link on its own is no use. Post some interesting stuff, follow other people, comment, share, and engage with the community, and you can build a following quite quickly.
13 – Storify (storify.com)
Rapidly growing site where you can post your own articles (stories), with links back to your site. Just create a small excerpt from your article or page, and link back to it from Storify.
14 – Delicious (del.icio.us)
Social bookmarking site. Just bookmark your links and build up your profile.
15 – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
Huge! It’s not easy to get backlinks from Wikipedia, but they are well worth the effort if you can. The best way is to find articles in your niche and find mistakes in them (eg broken links, or outdated references) and fix them with a link to a page of your own that is a better reference. Or you can add new references to your own material. Either way, you need to make sure that what you post is genuinely useful or your edit will soon be removed!
16 – wikiHow (wikihow.com)
Similar to Wikipedia. You can create your own articles with links inside. Once again, you need to focus on providing useful, high quality information, but as long as you do that there is no problem with providing links to your site as references.
17 – Quora (quora.com)
Huge site where people can ask and answer questions. You can put a link in your profile, and also in your answers to questions. Quora is a great place to meet your audience and find out what problems they are facing. Answer questions and build a presence in the community, and you will quickly become a recognised expert, which will attract traffic to your site. You can put links to your site into your answers too.
18 – WordPress (wordpress.org/support/topic)
Have you got a WordPress site? If so you can post a support question on the WordPress support forum and get a high quality backlink to your site. You must have some little issue with your site that you could ask for help with — if not think of one. And you’ll probably get an answer to your question too! Many WordPress themes also have a ‘showcase’ page in their forums, or a ‘request for feedback’ page. If the Theme you’re using has one of these, you can get another link there. None of these links are very relevant to your niche, but they can actually send you a bit of traffic — especially if your site looks nice!
19 – Diigo (diigo.com)
Social Bookmarking site where you can bookmark your own pages as well as other people’s. Links in your bookmarks and also in your profile. You can also create groups to engage with other people and make your links more relevant.
20 – Disqus (disqus.com)
Blog commenting system. Create an account and put a link in your profile page. You can also put links in comments that you leave, subject of course to them being approved by the blog owner. But if they provide useful information, and are a valuable addition to the thread, rather than just blatant self promotion, you should be fine.
21 – Livefyre (livefyre.com)
Another blog commenting system, like Disquus. Again, you can put a backlink in your profile page, and more links in your comments. If you do it right, you can get backlinks in comments on some of the biggest sites in the world.
22 – TED (ted.com)
A huge and highly engaged global community. Create a profile and fill in all the details, adding links to your site and social media accounts.
23 – Alltop (alltop.com)
All the top stories from around the world. Huge source of high-quality backlinks. Submit your site to AllTop, and if accepted you’ll get dofollow links from a DR 66 site that’s growing all the time.
24 – Criticue (criticue.com)
Website review site. Submit your site for review and you’ll get a nice dofollow link, and also some feedback on your site as well!
25 – Medium (medium.com)
One of my favourite sites on the internet. People go to Medium specifically to read great content — there is a hungry crowd there. You can post excerpts from your articles with a link back to your site to read the whole thing, and put a link in your profile too. These links are all dofollow, and Medium has a DR of 87!
26 – About Me (about.me)
This is a recommendation from Michael White, and he duly got his link in return! About.me gives you a beautiful personal information page with a dofollow link to your website, and your social media profiles from the 502nd biggest site on the internet with an Ahrefs DR of 75. Thanks Michael!
Nofollow v Dofollow links
Ah, but some people will say — “a lot of these links are nofollow links, therefore they’re worthless”.
They most certainly aren’t worthless!
Firstly a lot of those links are dofollow links, not nofollow.
Secondly, although Google say that they don’t take any account of nofollow links in their ranking algorithm, they don’t always tell us everything! In fact there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest they do take account of them. If you’re interested, you can read more about this at Search Engine Land.
I’ve certainly seen nofollow backlinks show up in Google Webmaster Tools.
And many of these links will send traffic in their own right, irrespective of any SEO benefit. And links bring other links from other sites. So they are all worth having.
Or you could just wait for Neil Patel to link to you…
If you liked this article, please share it by using the buttons below. If you have any suggestions for other link sources that I’ve missed out, please leave them in the comments below. If I like them I’ll add them, and give you a link!
Recommended Reading
If you enjoyed this, here are some more articles that may interest you: