High PR Linkbacks in the T-Shirt Industry or Any Industry!

I was handed this on a plate from my SEO guy - yes I do have one but I keep it quiet - he might be useless and I won’t know for six months (isn’t it always the way?). I do know he’s using my main email address to submit to a whole heap of directories, which means I’m signed up at all sorts of sites and get the odd annoying directory newsletter, fortunately I use gmail and just dump them in my spam folder (which must worry a lot of successful newsletter types out there. I’ll show you his trick in a minute, I just have to slate newsletters first.

The truth is newsletters are old hat, not black or white hat, just old hat. Feedburner amongst many other RSS web feed management services have made sure no one has to hand their email address over to another mailing list, unless of course they’e getting some freebies and then they only hang around long enough to collect on the goodies. Those goodies were probably always free or very cheap on Ebay, the few successful mailing lists out there are really for product updates, not advice, people don’t want to read generic advice in their inbox, they want it personal.

So, how do you reap the benefits of high PR linkbacks? Don’t worry it’s free, and no it doesn’t involve writing reams and reams of fanatical rants on your favourite subjects, although that can attract some Google kudos. The truth is Google does practically all the work for you, and with just one simple piece of code.

“t-shirts” “powered by wordpress” site:.edu
“funny-shirt” “powered by wordpress” site:.edu
“cool t shirts” “powered by wordpress” site:.edu
“keyword” “powered by wordpress” site:.edu

You’ll notice two things immediately, firstly I’m focusing on Wordpress blogs and secondly the TLD is .edu. Let me explain what’s going on here, Wordpress is known for having more “dofollow” bloggers than any other platform, that could simply break down into sheer numbers, it is after all the most popular blogging platform for site owners. Also many don’t remove the “powered by wordpress” footer link out of respect to the programmers and all the time and effort they put in to keeping the script updated.

We want to tell Google to search for .edu domains, or rather educational domains, and the ones you’ll be looking for are colleges and universities. The larger the campus the higher the Google PR. It seems that educational domains are given immediate PR authority for the plain fact that they are places of learning and information, they do not serve information in order to profit or steer opinion (for the most part) but rather inform objectively. Google loves objectivity, hence their love for large educational sites. In any case most of these sites will be popular on campus, never mind the outside world, if a few thousand people spend all day researching information on the same domain it’s bound to climb in popularity. Besides many .edu sites that allow the public to comment also offer “dofollow” links. I’m only at PR1 right now, but I’ve managed to find a few relevant .edu sites that have accepted my comments so I’m awaiting the next PR update with interest.

Now be sure that you stick to relevant comments, don’t be a spammer, if the thread has nothing to do with your blog then move on, if it does, make sure you don’t add your website links in the comment itself, link your name to your own website and if you must use html in the comment, ensure any links are highly relevant and third-party. If you’re really smart you’ll collate comment threads from different universities and cite them on each other’s blogs. If you do that you can get a real conversation going, and if you’re lucky you could be talking PR6+ linkage, which isn’t bad at all, there are universities out there with far higher but you should only find them if your subject is relevant, not by recommendation.

Anyway, it’s worth a try isn’t it? Let me know how you fair after the next update comes by, if my PR drops I will sack my SEO guy lol.

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