I recently wrote about The Best Social Media Sites for Link Building, highlighting the top social media sites that have a dofollow link to your sites, which means more link juice for you.

But, not everyone can get to the top of Digg, even if you have a fantastic post. So, I set out to find some great up-and-coming social media sites with dofollow links to your articles. I have found 2 of them that are great, and I will break down my thoughts on them:

http://blogoria.com

Blogoria is a “city” where people can submit their blogs, and the newest posts are cataloged on the front page, along with being able to search for different blogs in the different categories they offer. The more often you post, the more often your articles will be on the front page of blogoria. It is also great for networking with other bloggers that may have the same interest as you. Best of all, the links to your blog are dofollow! (What is dofollow?)

http://www.spicypage.com

Spicy Page is awesome, because it allows you to vote for blogs as a whole. You don’t have to compete with other articles or anything like that, people take your blog as a whole package and vote for it. They can also share it with friends, put your blog on their watchlist, and there’s also a really cool “blog this” feature. By securely adding your blog’s login details, you can blog about cool websites that you find with the click of a button from Spicy Page.

They also have a great “Startups” section, that allows you to post your startup in the site, and let people vote on it, and they display the top startups.

Overall, these are two great resources for getting some nice traffic, for networking with other bloggers, and also for getting some dofollow backlinks to your site, especially the internal pages.

There are many people wanting to know what “Dofollow” and “nofollow” are. I see it in my search engine stats for the keywords people use to search for my site, and one of my first posts, What is DoFollow? What is NoFollow? Follow Along and See, comes up high in the search engines.

But, maybe I am not doing a good enough job getting the information out. While compiling dofollow blogs for my upcoming DoFollow Blog Search Engine, I was searching through dofollow lists found on other sites, and I was finding that between 33-40% of the blogs listed on those dofollow lists were now nofollow.

Now, it’s fine is webmasters want to change from dofollow to nofollow, but here are 2 things that frustrate me about the dofollow movement and what needs to be fixed about them:

1) Pruning DoFollow lists.
Why aren’t webmasters, who’ve complied such lists and even link to them in their recent posts (they are doing internal link building right) pruning their lists, adding new blogs to them while removing the ones who are no longer dofollow? This needs to be done. Yah, I am lazy too, but if you are going to advertise something as a dofollow list, please do follow-through with your advertising by providing a solid list!

2) DoFollow is part of the link structure, not clicking on a link.
While browsing some blogs, there were a few webmasters under the impression that “DoFollow” meant that if you comment on their blog, they’ll click on the link and visit your site. While that can be good, that’s not what do follow is. Do follow has to do with the link structure, and adding rel=”nofollow” or not. I won’t go into here…. Click the link in the first sentence of this blog for more details on the specifics of dofollow.

Sorry for venting frustrations, but these are the types of issues that hinder our link building efforts.

Internal links are a nice factor in one way link building and ranking higher in the search engines. They help Google to think that your site is very well organized because you provide links to your deeper pages of your site.

They also help to give you backlinks when people steal your content. Yes, this post is written with frustration, because I found another site that is stealing my stuff. The first one I found that was stealing my stuff was only stealing the titles and the first sentences and then provided a “more” link to my site.

Then, today I logged into Wordpress and it showed me tons of backlinks from another blog… so I went and sure enough it was like 4-5 exact posts that I have written. They attribute me, and they even had the links I created in tact!

That is where internal link building helps you because when people steal your content and keep the internal links you made on there, then it creates links back to your site. These sites will have a duplicate content penalty, so I am not too worried, and I actually enjoy the fact that they are giving me backlinks because they are stupid.

So, the key to capitalizing on this crappy situation is to put backlinks at the beginning of the post so if they do only show a line or 2 and put ‘More” you still have a backlink with the anchor text of your choosing.

Also, if you put 2-3 internal links within a post, then the people who steal your whole content will have a few backlinks to your site.

So, DON’T STEAL MY CONTENT, BUT IF YOU ARE GOING TO, LEAVE THE LINKS IN TACT! THANKS!

To all others, thanks for reading!

Please check out the other posts in this Internal Link Building series….

Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Prequel
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 1
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 2
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 3
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 4
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 5
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 6

In a previous post, we had a guest post about how valuable CommentLuv was as a plugin on other people’s Wordpress blogs. We also showed you how to find CommentLuv blogs.

Well, a frequent reader of this blog, on his own blog, wrote A List of 100 Blogs With The CommentLuv Plugin.

This is a fantastic list for 3 reasons:

1) It allows others to find some great blogs to comment on and get some great link love back to internal pages on their site.

2) This guy is going to get TONS of backlinks to his own blog, especially this internal page, from posts just like this one, linking to his awesome list. THIS is the way to get a great bunch of natural backlinks. Create something people want to link to!

3) The list is only part 1 of 3… he has more parts coming… craziness!

For a brief overview of what CommentLuv is, it is a plugin for Wordpress that will check a commenter’s blog’s feed, and post the most recent post at the bottom of the comment, giving the commenter a great internal backlink to their site!

Enjoy this list!

Some of my most popular posts on this blog are:
How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has
and
How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has – Part 2

When people start link building campaigns, they want to be able to check their progress. Thanks to various websites who provide tools to see how many backlinks each site has (see the above articles), seeing that progress and your results is fairly easy to do. But, many people either use the tools improperly, use too many or too few tools, waste time, or just simply don’t use their full potential. Here are some tips to using backlink checking tools.

1. Don’t just use Google and Yahoo.
Many people when checking their backlinks, go to Google and type in “link:YourURLhere” and they usually don’t see many results, and therefore get discouraged. Yahoo!’s “link:YourURLhere” search does return more results, but it’s still not complete. Don’t just rely on these resources. Google’s Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo!’s SiteExplorer tools will give better results, but still don’t just rely on these.

2. Use multiple tools to check.
There are many different tools online that allow you to see how many backlinks your site has. But, they are not all created equal. Some use averages of major search engine numbers, Others don’t work with all search engines. Some provide you much more information such as your PageRank, your Alexa rank, the site your link is on’ PageRank, etc. Find 2 or 3 different tools that work the best for you, and stick with those. Sticking with just one won’t give you the most accurate, but using more than 3 or 4 will just be a waste of time.

3. Don’t compare one tool’s results to another tool’s results.
Even though I suggest using 2-3 different tools to check your backlinks, that doesn’t mean that you should compare them against eachother. The best thing to do is to create a spreadsheet, or just a normal .txt document, and write down the results from each tool. Then, once a week, check your results again, and log it in the spreadsheet. Then you can see the progress you have made with each tool.

4. Don’t check multiple times a day, or even week.
I know as a webmaster myself, that I want to check my stats multiple times a day. This is pretty useless, and a waste of time. Why waste your time checking your backlinks multiple times a day when you can focus your efforts on link building during that same time. If you focus on link building, you’ll be able to be more excited when you do check your results. Check maybe once or twice a week. You should pick a day, and check on that day every week.

5. Check your competitors backlinks.
When you are checking your backlinks, it is a good idea to check your competitor’s backlinks too. Find out what pages they have links on and see if you can get links on the same pages. You can also check if they are steadily increasing their backlinks or not. If they are not, then you know they are just begging to be taken over in the search engine rankings.

If you stick to these rules, you will be able to better see your progress and utilize your time and the tools better, in order to reach the top of the search engine rankings by focusing your efforts on link building instead of stat checking.