Category: Link Building News

Because we have just started the new year I have taken a look at some of the 2017 linkbaits we have done for clients and put together some information about them in this blog post. As always the trick with linkbaiting is to come up with articles that are relevant to the client but also funny, cool or interesting. Here are 10 of our best from the year 2017 with links to them.

The Biggest Things Ever to be Transported by Sea

In August we created an article for 1st Move International that looked at some of the largest things to ever be transported by sea along with cool pictures. Learn about when the Statue of Liberty was moved to America, an oil rig was moved and more. This was probably our most successful linkbait of the year and got a bunch of amazing links.

To check it out click here

15 Bizarre Flags From Around the World

We put this one together for the guys at UK Feather Flags in February and it has great high res pictures of some of the most unusual flags from around the World. Read about the Mozambique flag, the Antwerp flag, the Nepal flag and more. This is a very popular piece and it gets a lot of traffic.

To check it out click here

A Gloriously Haunting Tour of Abandoned France

Here is a phenomenal linkbait we did at the start of the year for the people at Gites.co.uk with fantastic pictures of abandoned places in France. View info about The Seaside War Bunker, The Abandoned Railway Line, The Crumbling Military Base and more. This one got over 3000 hits and links from authority sites.

To check it out click here

When Nature Moves In

You will love this linkbait that we did for the folks at Direct Holiday Cottages which has excellent pictures of places around the World where mother nature has taken over. The piece includes The Village Green in China, empty houses in Nambia that are filled with sand and more. This one has had over 7000 hits so far and got some good links.

To check it out click here

Six of the World’s Most Extravagant (and Expensive) Homes

In September we knocked up an article for the website Bridging Loans.co.uk with information about some of the priciest homes from around the World. Includes Antilia in Mumbai, India and Villa Leopolda in the French Riviera to name a couple. Did well on links and traffic.

To check it out click here

15 of the Coolest Homes in the UK

Here is one we did for the interior design company Saxton Interiors that provides pictures of bizarre homes from around the UK. Check out Hind House near the village of Wargrave, El Ray based in Dungeness Beach in Kent and lots more unusual homes. A successful piece.

To check it out click here

5 Brilliantly Crazy, Colourful and Creative Kitchens

Here is a really cool blog post that we created for the team at Kitchen Exchange which features pictures of creative kitchens around the World. View info about a kitchen made from Lego, a kitchen created with literally millions of tiny glass beads and others. The linkbait got some good links.

To check it out click here

Top 10 Amazing Pimped Out Wheelchairs

In November we came up with a linkbait for the people at Webster Wheelchairs with pictures of amazing wheelchairs. Article features a tank wheelchair, Lady Gaga’s gold wheelchair, a really fast wheelchair and more. The client was pleased with the results.

To check it out click here

Ten of the World’s Most Haunting Abandoned Airports

We came up with a quality article for the guys at the Cheap Flights Finder website which takes a look at abandoned airports around the World. Includes pictures of an abandoned airport in Nicosia, Cyprus, one in Athens, Greece and 8 more. The linkbait has helped the client with their SEO.

To check it out click here

How Not to Make A Sign

Here is a hilarious blog post that we made for Ainsley Signs that provides pictures of signs that can be easily misinterpreted (in some cases because of automatic kerning). Includes a massage sign, a barber shop sign, a kids shop sign and more.

To check it out click here

We hope that you enjoy checking out our 2017 linkbaits and if you want us to have a go at one for your site then do not hesitate to get in touch.

A few weeks ago we were hired by international removals company 1st Move International to create and promote an infographic for them about the amazing TV show Game of Thrones. The company had already come up with all of the data which included calculations of exactly how much it cost to ship Daenerys Targaryen’s entire army to Westeros. All we had to do was make the information beautiful which is exactly what we did with help from our friends at Glow New Media in Liverpool.

The stunning infographic shows how much it would cost to ship the Dothraki horses, the weaponry, the royal council, the food, the Dothraki troops and the unsullied troops across the Narrow Sea from Essos to Westeros.

Check it out:

Once the infographic was ready we sent it over to the client along with some tips on how to post it such as making the blog post wider and making the URL nice, short and tidy.

We then got cracking on the promotion by first of all posting the infographic to the Game of Thrones section on Reddit, which is always a great place to start with marketing your piece. The redditors absolutely loved it and the post went viral racking up over 6000 up votes and 500 comments which you can check out by clicking here.

From there the piece started to make it’s way around the internet and got picked up by some very prestigious websites such as Mashable and Esquire Magazine.

Traffic:

To be honest the piece didn’t do as well as you might think as far as traffic goes. The thing is that when blogs and websites link to an infographic they generally post the piece themselves which means there isn’t any need for people to click that link, but that doesn’t really matter because most of the time the client is more interested in links than traffic. Anyway here are the hits the infographic got for the 1st week.

05/07/2017 – 147
06/07/2017 – 206
07/07/2017 – 153
08/07/2017 – 55
09/07/2017 – 27
10/07/2017 – 47
11/07/2017 – 33

Social:

As we do with all of the infographics we work on we posted the piece on as many social networking sites as we could think of including all of the well known ones such as Facebook and Twitter as well as lesser known ones like Imgur and 9gag. Check out the votes and mainly positive comments it received.

Facebook – 29 shares
Twitter – Unknown
Stumbleupon – 71 stumbles
Linkedin – 81 shares
Reddit – 6584 up votes and 547 comments
Imgur – 40 up votes and 20 comments
9gag – 12 points and 9 comments
Dashburst – 303 views

If I were to include the social shares from other sites that published the infographic then the numbers would be much higher.

Links:

Now for the juicy bit, here are what in my opinion are the 10 best editorial links that the infographic has received so far. I have included the Moz.com domain authority scores but bare in mind a higher score doesn’t always mean that it is a better link, sometimes there is a bit more to it than that.

Mashable – DA 95/100
LaVanguardia.com – DA 88/100
The Daily Dot – DA 82/100
Holy Kaw – DA 80/100
Bristol Post – DA 75/100
Esquire Magazine – DA 71/100
Shortlist – DA 65/100
Filmstarts.de – DA 64/100
Cool Infographics – DA 64/100
Winter is Coming – DA 59/100

Overall the infographic got well over 30 proper links. To view the full size infographic along with information about how they came up with the data and that – Click here

If you want us to design and promote an infographic for your business then get in touch.

I have just finished off promoting an infographic for Liverpool based Glow New Media about sci fi movies and TV shows that predicted the future and it has done incredibly well, it is probably the most successful infographic we have promoted so far. Now technically the infographic is not that good, there is not that much information and a lot more could have been done but it looked good and featured a lot of good movies that people like. Please take into consideration that this is only Glow’s 2nd attempt at an infographic:

What do you think? Not bad aye? Check out the results it got.

Traffic:

Since I started promotion the infographic has brought a steady flow of extra visitors to the Glow website, here is the number of unique visitors it has received each day since it went online.

25/06/2013 – 149
26/06/2013 – 550
27/06/2013 – 269
28/06/2013 – 372
29/06/2013 – 273
30/06/2013 – 129
01/07/2013 – 311
02/07/2013 – 563
03/07/2013 – 271

Not a massive amount, but I am confident that it will go on pulling in more traffic for some time.

Social:

When I 1st posted a link to it on Reddit some nerd came and wrote a massive paragraph about why it sucked and I didn’t think it was going to do well but it went on to do very well on a lot of social sites.

Reddit – 8 up votes
Stumbleupon – 4 likes
Facebook – 110 shares and 124 likes
Twitter – 66 tweets
Google + – 23 +1s
Visual.ly – 8 likes and 2 comments

All natural people. Facebook has sent the most traffic so far, just over 500 visits.

Links:

Now here is where the infographic really excelled and we all know it’s links that count.

All together I have been able to find 46 decent blogs that have linked through to the Glow New Media site so far thanks to the infographic and I am not including scrapers or anything like that. Here are 10 of the best ranked by the homepage PageRank score of the linking site.

Guy Kawasaki’s Blog – PageRank 7
Buzzfeed – PageRank 7
French Gizmodo – PageRank 6
TrendHunter – PageRank 6
SciFiNow – PageRank 5
TECHi – PageRank 5
BitRebels – PageRank 5
Zimo – PageRank 5
Xataka – PageRank 5
French Vanity Fair – PageRank 0

If you are interested and you want the full list of blogs then send me an email and I will send it to you.

The infographic also got published on the Blockbuster Blog but unfortunately the link is a nofollow – I will have to try and get them to change that.

The original infographic with embed code can be found here.

Over the last 10 months or so I have really got into doing infographics for our clients. At the moment they are really popular and generally getting even more links then regular linkbaits.

By practising I have got pretty good at marketing infographics for our clients and am normally getting very good results.

Submitting to infographic sites is a great way to kick start your infographic marketing campaign and there are plenty of them out there. The thing is that when I have been going through infographic site lists around the web I have had problems. The problems with the infographic sites on the lists are, either a/ the infographic site has been abandoned and not updated in months, or b/ the infographic site is very popular and so overwhelmed with submissions that it could take weeks or even months for your submission to be approved or finally c/ the owner of the infographic site wants cash (and sometimes a ridiculous amount) to review your submission.

Through hard work and testing I have figured out which the best free to submit to infographic sites are that will actually approve your submission in a timely manner. Here are the top 10:

Update: A lot of the sites originally featured in this post are no longer available or not accepting submissions, so I fully updated the list for you in April 2020. A few of these new sites are not just for infographics.

1/ visual.ly

Visual.ly is without a doubt the king of infographic sites with very high authority and more traffic then any other infographic site. All you have to do is sign up, click on the submit page and then follow instructions. Your infographic will be published straight away with a link or two to your site.

2/ Reddit Infographics

Another fantastic place to submit your infographic for free is the infographics category on reddit. All you have to do is create an account and upload your infographic. If the community likes your piece and it gets a lot of up votes then you can get some great exposure.

3/ Pinterest

If you don’t already have a Pinterest account then set one up to upload your infographics. I have been creating boards and posting infographics and cool pics to the site for the past 7 or so years and my account is practically a work of art. If you get a lot of repins it can really help with your promotion.

4/ Cool Infographics

This infographic blog is authored by Randy Krum and has been running ever since 2007. The site has high authority and ranks great in the search engines, making it a great place to get featured. Please note, Randy does have very high standards so make sure you submit your best work.

5/ Infographic Journal

This is one of the most popular infographic blogs around and a great place to submit your piece. The site ran by David Wallace posts around 10-15 decent infographics a week. You can pay a small fee for an express submission or you can submit for free. They do approve the free ones quite a lot.

6/ Business 2 Community

A high authority community blog that accepts quite a few infographics, as you can see here. Before you are able to submit you have to apply to become a contributor, but it doesn’t take long and I was accepted within a day or two. You do need to write a proper article to go with your infographic and it has to be business/tech related.

7/ Shit Hot Infographics

My own infographic blog that I launched in November 2013. My domain authority is not as high as the other ones I have mentioned, however it does have some quality links from important sites. I get a lot of horrible infographics submitted that I ignore, but when the good ones come through I usually post them.

8/ Dashburst

Dashburst is a social network and blogging platform where you can post photos, videos, articles and more. They love it when you upload quality infographics and the ones I add usually get at least a couple of hundred views. Set up an account to get started.

9/ uCollect Infographics

This is an infographic site where you set up an account and create your own infographic posts. This website publishes a huge amount of infographics and gets a lot of traffic. You can open an account for free or go for a basic or premium package for a small fee. The ones I add always get approved.

10/ Air Infographics

Here is an up and coming free infographic site that I have just started submitting to recently and so far they have approved everything I have sent. The blog has a great design, a choice of categories to submit to and useful online marketing articles. Got to the submit infographic page to get started.

I hope you find this post useful. Best of luck promoting your infographic.

About two weeks ago I got a trackback or something and found this site called the WAHH Marketer’s Blog linking to me, I checked out the page and the reason it had linked to me was because of Zemanta, a content enhancement tool for bloggers.

Here is what the Zemanta website says about their product:

“Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin.

5M+ pictures, 5M+ articles. 10M+ possibilities.”

So the reason I got a free dofollow link on a relevant page is because my Altavista.com article was picked up by the Zemanta system and recognised as a relevant page.

How awesome is that, I haven’t paid Zemanta any money or even registered with them and they are hooking me up with free dofollow backlinks on good quality relevant blogs.

Here are a couple more links from Zemanta that I have found on Google:

• Search: The Human Vs. The Machine
• Youtuber: 15 Must-Follow Comedic Film Actors on Twitter

So to the guys at Zemanta thanks very much for making an awesome product, I bet it is great for bloggers who use it as well, the ones that linked me just got a decent link out of it didn’t they? I reckon other bloggers will as well.

Update: I have just found out that the 3rd blog post I linked to was actually copied from Mashable, I probably should have checked before I linked to it, I remember thinking it was a decent post because it mentioned 4 of the celebrities who I follow and I don’t follow many. I have just placed a nofollow link to that post. I’m not complaining or anything it’s still a free link, but I won’t link out properly to copied content.

Altavista is my favourite tool for checking links and here’s why:

1. It shows more results then any other link checking tool (not including Google webmaster tools, but you can’t check competitors with that) – You can see a maximum of 1,000 separate domains linking to a URL or domain.

2. It only ever shows 2 results from one domain so the results you get don’t get swamped with a couple of site wide links.

3. If your IP address is based in the UK the results show the links with the most juice on Yahoo UK at the top so you can find out which links are helping you most on Yahoo. From the testing that I have done I have seen that generally Yahoo rates the same UK sites Google does – the links that rank high on Altavista’s link command will be from sites with good PageRank.

So there you have it, if you like checking on who’s linking to your site or blog go to Altavista.com and give it a shot.

You can check how many links a page has by searching for link: and then the page URL and you can check how many links a domain has by typing in linkdomain: and then the domain you want to check without the www. Just like on Yahoo site explorer but better.

I recently started working on a new design agency site called Kosh Creative, it’s ran by a guy called Ben Smith, he is doing some design work for me in exchange for help with SEO.

I’ve been doing the usual link building stuff, getting it listed in directories, giving it a bookmark here and there and because it is a nice looking site getting it featured in CSS galleries.

When I was searching for CSS galleries to submit to I came across this site called The CSS Gallery List offering me a deal where for $20 they will submit you to 87 CSS directories. Now I never buy directory submission services from anywhere, I always do them myself by hand, mainly because they always submit you to crappy linkfarms, but this site was offering me submissions to quality well designed sites with good PageRank and unique features so I gave it a shot.

I have got to say that I am absolutely amazed at the results, less then 24 hours after I purchased the service, CSS gallery listings were showing up on Google, many of them with labelled dofollow image links going directly to the Kosh Creative website. Plus because I submitted the website title as as Kosh Creative Design Agency instead of Kosh Creative many of the links had good anchor text.

The best part about this though is the traffic, before I bought the pack the Kosh site was only getting a few visitors, about 10-25 a day. I bought the package on Tuesday the 26th of May and immediately it started getting more visits, here are the site’s visitor traffic levels for the last 7 days according to Google analytics:

25/05 – 22
26/05 – 53
27/05 – 59
28/05 – 58
29/05 – 597
30/05 – 401
31/05 – 292

As you can see on Friday the traffic just exploded, this is because it got featured on CSS Mania and a couple of other biggish ones. Here are the 10 CSS galleries that have sent the most traffic to Kosh so far:

• CSS Mania – 846
• CSS Based – 31
• CSS Leak – 28
• CSS Motion – 18
• QNT – 15
• Best CSS Gallery – 11
• CSS Cookie – 10
• CSS Websites – 9
• Best CSS Vault – 8
• CSS Fury – 8

So let me break this down for you for $20 I got the Kosh Creative website about 30-40 links on separate high PageRank sites, most of the links pass juice, many of them even have good anchor text and to top it off the links have sent a shit load of targeted traffic (because the site is in the design industry). The traffic has already gained the site about 6-7 delicious bookmarks over the weekend and I am sure it will lead to Ben getting work.

I know some of you might say well linkbaiting can be even cheaper and it can, but most of the time it is hard god dam work, this isn’t, it took me like 30 seconds to fill in that form and look what I got out of it.

It probably won’t be anywhere near as successful if you have a plain looking site like this one because it won’t get accepted in most of them, but if you have a good looking site that you are trying to promote it is a great way to spend $20 on link building.

Get yourself over to The CSS Gallery List and give it a whirl, you will not be sorry.

I have been teased really badly twice recently on Yahoo site explorer. The 1st time was about a month or so ago now:

I typed in linkdomain:www.seoco.co.uk and up came this URL: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/planet. I got really excited and actually did a little jig thinking that I had been linked to by the W3. But I had not been linked to by them, this guy called Andrew Grill had linked and his feed is displayed on that page. The link from W3 was temporary and pretty worthless.

Today again I was teased whilst checking the links to this site. The URL I saw come up was from Harvard no less: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/idtechtools/, the stuff link building dreams are made of. I really got my hopes up only to once again find that it was a temporary link. This time it was because a guy called Ethan Zuckerman had linked to me.

So there you have it, don’t get excited about the links you see in site explorer until you are sure that they are permanent. The links from Andrew and Ethan are also amazing of course.

On a much happier link building note: a mainstream media site did link to the article on the mainstream media linking out.

The mainstream media has come under fire many times in the past for failing to link out to sources from their stories. However the problem isn’t with the entire industry and it’s wrong to make generalisations when a good number of online news websites are very good at crediting sources with the appropriate link.

Some websites have adopted a half hearted approach of linking to lots of websites, but only from blog posts – the main articles in the site only contain internal links.

We believe that linking to useful websites doesn’t “leak” traffic – quite the opposite in fact. Offering useful links actually makes visitors more likely to return to see what other interesting websites they might find in the future, a model that sites such as Digg and Fark are built around.

Of course as a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere. We spent some time researching the issue to see if there was a correlation between the frequency a site links out and the number of links it gets in return.

The results below might just surprise you.

	Links out			Links
Newspaper	Main stories	Blog posts	Domain Strength	Incoming	Outgoing
			99%	29,629,082	1,730,000
			99%	18,415,777	970,000
			88%	25,667,372	1,940,000
			97%	15,114,877	1,600,000
			87%	14,421,388	722,000
			98%	11,986,781	729,000
			99%	11,867,676	1,080,000
			97%	9,968,336	1,360,000
			92%	7,862,887	254,000
			97%	7,038,634	474,000
			92%	5,980,262	275,000
			83%	5,434,310	357,000
			88%	4,121,583	144,000
			93%	3,995,969	330,000
			97%	3,709,030	1,460,000
			96%	3,667,889	169,000
			83%	3,233,951	12,600
			92%	3,087,518	226,000
			90%	2,452,153	211,000
			88%	1,001,791	16,800
			78%	552,930	196,000
			74%	408,462	60,700
			60%	183,570	14,500
			60%	164,586	3,960
			58%	94,804	878
			48%	31,356	337

By entering all the incoming and outgoing link values from the table above into an Excel spreadsheet we used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to determine whether there was in fact a correlation between the number of times a website links out and the number of links it gets back in return.

The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return.

Comments from the media

In order to make sure this article was as balanced as possible we contacted a number of mainstream newspapers to ask what their linking policy was. The responses are below.

It appears that a number of newspapers have a policy of linking out, but in practice this doesn’t always happen for many reasons.

Tom Happold, Network editor Guardian Unlimited

“It has always been our policy to point our readers to whatever we think is of interest on the web.”

James Montgomery Editor, FT.com

“What I can say, regarding attribution by the FT to non-FT sources, is that one needs a clear distinction between “attribution” and “sourcing”, journalistically speaking. Citing a non-FT source would not, generally speaking, meet the FT’s required standards of verification. (Just because something is reported by the New York Times, say, doesn’t make it true, however much we implicitly believe what we read in that newspaper – we have to check for ourselves.)

Obviously, we are more inclined to believe some sources (Reuters) than others (chat rooms). Many blogs might be regarded as inherently unreliable because they don’t reveal their sources or uphold traditional journalistic/MSM standards of reporting (eg, double sourcing, on the record or whatever). But there is nothing intrinsically untrustworthy about blogs as a genre.

So when it comes to linking out on FT.com, a link does not constitute sourcing for us. But as a general rule, if we do acknowledge some third party content, then best practice would be to carry a link to it.

For example, if we write: “Yesterday’s statement by the prime minister appeared to represent a climbdown from an interview to the BBC last week in which he pledged….”, then we would link “interview” to the BBC article. That’s a service to the reader, who may want to follow the link to learn more; and a confirmation that we have accurately reported the earlier quote.

Do we also live up to this best practice? No, because of some technology issues to do with persistent hyperlinks in text in our CMS, and newsroom training. But we are improving.

Last, and this is probably what you really want to know, when do we acknowledge third-party content? This is tricky – lots of facts/information/articles written in the FT, or any other publication for that matter, existed earlier somewhere else. But so what? That doesn’t mean we have to credit every snippet of information to another publisher. We do “hat tip” our competition, in print or online, for a genuine clean scoop; and best practice would therefore require a link.”

Drew Broomhall – Search Editor, Times Online

“Times Online has a policy of linking out to third party sites where editorially appropriate, such as products, organisations, reports etc mentioned in articles. Some sections do more than others, it depends on the section’s editor. Our outbound link count might even have been higher before the relaunch, a lot of links were lost due to html being stripped out of inline links when they migrated to a new CMS.”

Credits: Mark Woodbury, Trifecta Tool Set, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search.

I have just started to put in place a directory of UK web designers and yesterday I got my 1st request for a listing:

“Hi there,

Please can you put my design company into your Directory for Yorkshire. We are a newly established business but have a successful record so far! Our website is being built at the moment (funny how you can design everyone else’s website and never find time for your own!).

Our address:

Unit 4 Amber Business Centre, Rawmarsh road, Rotherham, S60 1RU.

Kind Regards,

Candice Link

Managing Director

JEWEL Cre@tive Ltd”

Her last name is link, how awesome is that for link requests? I was so impressed with her last name, I told her she could have a listing immediately, even though I have not properly launched the dir yet.

Candice’s website, Jewel Creative will be online soon.