A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can't Believe It's Not Blackhat

An alternative title for this would be "Tom's Headsmacking Linkbuilding Tip #1," but I'm not sure this will be a whole series so I'm going to play it safe with a title which doesn't force me to come up with these ideas on a regular basis. I know, I'm lazy. Bite me!

Talking of being lazy - I'm always looking for ways to jumpstart linkbuilding campaigns and cut corners, and if my knowledge of the human race is accurate then the rest of you are too. This is backed up by Rand's recent post on which parts of SEO everyone finds hardest. The vast majority of you said external link acquisition is the hardest for you.

That's why today I'm presenting a get-rich-quick linkbuilding tactic which actually works across virtually any niche. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it's not. Here's how it's done. Oh, and by the way, it's 100% whitehat :-)

The basic principle is this:

Find pages or sites which used to offer a service and no longer do
 
As soon as I had this idea I did a Google search for no longer available and I spotted ranking 4th the BBC Antiques page, which is the pagerank 6 antiques page on the BBC site.....WHICH NO LONGER OFFERS ANY ANTIQUES CONTENT. When I saw this page I knew instantly that this idea was going to be killer and would find me a LOT of quality links.

Before I detail how to find pages like this, let me explain how you use them for linkbuilding (if it isn't immediately obvious!). There are two basic ways you can use these pages for linkbuilding if you have a site which is in the same niche:

1. Contact the owner of the page/site and request that they add a link to your (still live and active site!) from their page which no longer offers the service. It's a win for the site owner as they provide a useful page to any of their users who find the page and it's a win for you because, well, did you see my comment about the page being PR6?
2. Do a link analysis on the page to find all those sites who think they're linking to a useful page and contact them saying "Hi, I notice you link to the BBC antiques page. I'm not sure if you're aware but they stopped offering this service. I was wondering if you'd like to link to my antiques site instead as this is a lively and active web 2.0 antiques site with social voting and wardrobes." Wondering how effective this is? Well that BBC page has 1044 links (not to mention the other pages in that folder).
   

So this is all very well and good, but what happens if you don't run an antiques site? In that case you need to start thinking outside the box and constructing some more creative queries. (By the way, if anyone does run an antiques website and gets some use out of this then I'd love to hear from you, so please drop me a line or leave a comment down below.) Thankfully, here's some I made earlier:

For finding sites which no longer offer a service or have expired:

• "service no longer available"
• "service no longer available" [keyword]
• "service no longer available" inurl:.ac.uk (or inurl:.edu for all you foreigners)
• "no longer available [keyphrase]"
• "site no longer available"
• "site no longer available" [keyphrase]
• "site has been taken down"
• "site has been taken down" [keyphrase]

For finding sites which no longer sell a specific product:

• "no longer offer [keyword]"
• "no longer sell [keyword]"
• "stopped selling [keyword]"
• "stopped offering [keyword]"

The trick to using these effectively is to mine their backlinks for people who link to them looking for that product - this can be more time consuming but very, very worthwhile. Remember how hard it is to build links directly to your product page normally!

Anyway - you get the idea. It's not hard to follow this methodology to produce a whole bunch more queries and niches to look in to find your own links.

It's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between this tactic and the practice of buying sites for SEO. This method is more time consuming but cheaper and doesn't come with the risks associated with buying sites. Still, the methodologies for finding the sites can be quite similar and a lot has already been said on that topic by such luminaries as Shoemoney, Aaron Wall & QuadsZilla, so be sure to check out that info. Also, see Tamar's recap of the SMX Advanced session for more solid tips.

By the way - anyone who's a PRO member should head on over and read this pro tip which contains power tips, examples of sites I've found, and how to apply this thinking to blogs. If you're not a PRO member, what are you waiting for?