The following is a Link Building Bible guest post from Bill Woosley, owner of vmoptions.com (backlinks below).

There seems to be some myths regarding free web directories and the benefits they offer for backlinks. In this post I will try to clear up some of these myths and offer a few tips to get the most out of your free web directory submissions.

First, it is important to note that high pagerank free web directories get quite a few submissions on a daily basis. These high ranking directories often have backlogs that will take months to clear. I have found many of the people that claim free directory listings are ineffective usually are the same people that submit to only high ranking directories. It would take months for these people to realize any benefit from their free submissions. Being listed in free directories does help offpage SEO, but one must use a different approach to get immediate results.

Besides operating a deep link directory, I also operate a free directory list that contains more then 1,600 SEO friendly general web directories that are free to submit to. This is the same list I submit client sites to, and I constantly update the list. Even though this directory list can be sorted by PR, I always start submitting client sites to the newest free web directories I have. Newly launched free web directories have few listings, a small review backlog, and usually have more favorable listing standards. The bottom line is newly launched free web directories will get your submissions reviewed and posted in a fraction of the time it takes high ranking directories to review free submissions. And because there are fewer competing listings in new directories, the search engines will index your links rather quickly. If you want immediate results from the time you spend submitting to free directories, then you should focus on submitting to the newest directories you can find.

Those that want to improve their PR can take some additional steps to get the most out of their directory listings. Look at the homepage of any free web directory. In many cases there are dozens of sub-categories listed. If your submission is acceptable in any of the sub-categories you see listed on the homepage, submit to that category. PR flows down from pages linked to from the homepage. If your listing is in a sub-category that is directly linked to from the homepage, you stand a much better chance of getting some PR distributed to your site.

It is also important to vary the submission titles, descriptions, submitter’s name, and meta information as much as possible. As with any link building method, it is important that these links look natural to the search engines as well as appealing to anyone viewing the listings. As a standard rule of thumb, I completely change out submission sets every fifty submissions for bulk submissions. For even better results, change submission sets more often. In the long run, this will reduce the likelihood of the links being devalued.

While most agree that free directory listings are not a silver bullet to top rankings for competitive keywords, I can tell you that they are effective. I have a number of sites, under one year of age, that are PR 4’s and rank well for their keywords. These sites have only backlinks from free web directories, and in some of the sites the PR is distributed rather well to internal pages. For competitive niches, web directory submissions are just a small part of a diversified link building strategy.

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.

Wow… whenever I go through my RSS reader, I always see awesome posts people have written about link building tips. One particular place that I usually find great tips is Mixed Market Arts. I recently wrote about link building with Unasked, which is a great tip I got from Collin at Mixed Market Arts.

Today’s tip is also from Collin, but I have expanded on it to create even more opportunities for you to create solid free backlinks.

The article on Mixed Market Arts, Link Building with Gather, shows you an awesome site which allows people to submit articles to, called Gather.

Before you go read the article on Mixed Market Arts, read-on here for a way to go above and beyond the tips Collin provides, with regards to creating backlinks.

Collin talks about joining Gather, and submitting articles with backlinks in the articles, with the anchor text of your choice. All of those links are “dofollow” links. (What is dofollow?)

While I was sitting back amazed at this great link building opportunity, I realized that using their comment system, you can leave comments on people’s articles, and the comments have “dofollow” links also! This is an amazing opportunity.

1) Use the Gather search form, type in your keyword (for me, I’d type in “link building”). Then, find articles that people have written about your keyword. Then, leave a non-spam looking, legit comment on their articles, using a link with the anchor text of your choosing (just use normal HTML tags for links) and you have just built a backlink!

2) Find the articles with higher PR. Although this will be harder to do, and the links will not be relevant links, they will still be pr4, pr3, and pr2 links back to your website with the anchor text of your choice.

I hope that now when you read the article about Gather over at Mixed Market Arts, you can build more backlinks to your site using Gather.  We all love free backlinks!

One of the first posts I made on this blog dealt with different websites that you can use to check your backlinks (See: How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has). I figured it would be kind of popular, but I had no clue that it would be as popular as it is! People really want to be able to check how many backlinks they have. They also like to check the backlinks of their competitors’ websites.

So, in an effort to bring my readers what they want, I have scoured the web for even more websites that you can use to check how many backlinks your site has. Not all of them are the best, and some really aren’t that great at all, but hopefully with a whole bunch options for checking your backlinks, you are able to find one or two that you really like.

NOTE: As I wrote in the previous “Check Your Backlinks” post, I suggest not using them all. I also recommend that you don’t compare the numbers against each other. Find the one that works best for you and seems most accurate for your site, and monitor it weekly in order to see the progress of your one way link building campaign.

Now, here’s the list:

Link Diagnosis
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com
This is a nice tool for showing you your backlinks, and also breaking down your backlinks of your internal pages too. To get the full effect of this tool, you need to install the Firefox plugin for it (don’t worry, they’ll tell you that you need to, and how to install it.) It does take longer with the Firefox plugin installed, because it gets so much more information for you, including: anchor text and total number of links on the page your link is on.

Domain Pop
http://www.domain-pop.com/
This site allows you to check each domain once every 5 days. (I know, you want to be able to check every 5 minutes, but instead of always checking your backlinks, work on one way link building instead!) This site shows you how many links total you have, how many domains and how many different IP’s your links are on. It also gives a basic breakdown of the pages on each domain that your links are on.

dnScoop’s Domain and Site Value Tool
http://www.dnscoop.com/
This tool tells you your domain’s age, your PageRank, whether or not the PageRank is valid, How many inbound links according to Yahoo, your Alexa traffic rank, the IP report which has all of the domains on that IP, the text Link Ads estimated Link Value, and an estimated “total site value”.

W3tool’s Backlink Checker
http://www.w3tool.com/backlink/
This tool is nice, because it lets you check up to 10 URLs at the same time. This is great for checking your main site and multiple internal pages, or simply checking your site against your competitor’s sites. It does not display’s Google’s links, but it does display Yahoo’s, AltaVista’s and Alltheweb’s.

LinkVendor’s Domain Popularity Analysis
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/domain-popularity.html
This tool searches Yahoo, and gives a domain-by-domain breakdown of a sample of the pages your link is found on. It also tells you the different IPs and to see each page’s PageRank, you need to register for the service and login. Everything else requires no registration.

1stSearchEngineRanking’s Link Popularity Tool
http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/link-popularity-tool/
This one tells your Alexa rank, your PageRank, and how many links you have on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The yahoo numbers seem to be a bit low, comparing it against searching Yahoo’s own Site Explorer. Either way, it’s a pretty conservative number for each site, so definitely a tool to use for weekly benchmarking.

Piloun’s WebInfo
http://www.piloun.com/info
This breaks down your Google PageRank and Alexa rank, the number of pages index in Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and MSN. It also shows you the backlinks for Yahoo and google, although they use the “link:yoururlhere.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

WeBuildPages Free Backlink Checker
http://www.thelinkpop.com/index.php
This tool doesn’t accurately report the number of links Google sees. It does accurately display the number that Yahoo and AltaVista see. This is just a set of numbers, for a very quick check.

PageRankr
http://www.pagerankr.com/
This little tool tells you the PageRank, how many pages you have indexed in Google, and how many pages link to you for Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb, and AltaVista. This uses the “link:yoururl.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Popularity Checker
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml
This basic tool, is about the same as PageRankr, showing you how many pages link to you for Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb, and AltaVista. They also use the “link:yoururl.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

Feel free to post a comment with a link to a resource that isn’t in this or the previous “Check your backlinks” post.

The following is a guest post from Nick Cristey; owner of Hannah Montana Zone – a Miley Cyrus fansite.

Amongst other ways of one way link building such as social bookmarking (preferably on “dofollow” sites) and article writing, blog comment posting is a popular one. If you don’t know that commenting on people’s blogs who do not use “nofollow” increases your backlinks, then start finding blogs that you can comment on as part of your link building campaigns (starting with Link Building Bible!)

There’s a Wordpress Plug-in that blog owners can place on their blog that searches a commenter’s RSS feed and posts the title of the most recent feed at the bottom of a blog post with a link to that post. This plug-in is called CommentLuv. Link Building Bible has just added it to their blog. It is a fantastic way for a blog owner to encourage comments on their blog.

The problem here is how to find relevant blogs on which to comment on – and of course Google comes to our aid!

Simply go to Google and type this in, replacing “Your Keyword” with, well, your keyword:

Your Keyword “Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you”

At the moment of writing this, there are 555,000 blogs that contain that bit of text, which is 555,000 blogs you can leave your comment on. By simply adding your keyword at the beginning of the search term, you can reduce this larger number to blogs relevant to your niche. For example, say we are targeting the keyword “Technology”. To find all the relevant blogs, type in Google:

Technology “Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you”

And we get about 200 blogs we can comment on. Assuming that our comments are not spam and add value to the blog post, that’s 400 backlinks for this one term (One for your anchor text link, and one for your most recent RSS feed)! Of course the above is a single niche example which is quite limited but you get the idea!

Now it’s time to change the term to our other niche related keywords we are targeting, and start commenting!

NOTE: When posting comments on other people’s blogs, do not spam. Make your comment helpful and useful to help preserve the “dofollow” community. (What is dofollow? Find out here.)

UPDATE: Easily find DoFollow blogs with CommentLuv on themwith our new DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver!