Free PR links

July 10, 2008 on 4:50 pm | In Blackhat SEO |

This is a method of getting free links. The links:

  • Have Google PageRank (PR)
  • Allow you to use your keywords as the anchor text

I’m not going to argue about how accurate PR is. At the end of the day, it’s a quick and easy way to see how much a link is likely to help you. If a page has a PR4 for example then the chances are it has at least a few external links going into it and wil benefit you in the serps.

After you have done your on-page SEO, it comes down to links links links! If you want to rank for the word “Bingo” then go ahead and buy/spam/socialise(link bait etc) 1,000 links from high quality sites with the anchor text “bingo”.

I was actually using this method quite a few years ago but in a slightly different way which I will save for the next post :)

Quick overview
The basic idea is to look for forum posts which already have PR, we then signup to the forum and post a relevant message on the post. After a day or two, we return to the post and edit it to include our link.

Full process

Step 1
Install an add-on for your browser which allows you to view the pagerank of each search result in Google. This allows us to quickly see which forum posts have PR without having to visit each individual page. You could use SEO For Firefox or SEOQuake

Step 2
We start by searching for forums, it’s that simple. For example, we might perform a search for vBulletin Forums.

Step 3
Select one forum from the results of step 2 and do a site: search on it.

In the screenshot above you can clearly see there is an internal thread which has a PR2 (a tell tale sign for vBulletin forums is the use of a default URL structure.. showthread.asp?t=xxx).

Step 4
Signup to the forum and verify your account. Make a relevant post on the previously found thread.

Step 5
Repeat step 2-4 many times and ensure you keep a note of all the posts and your login details.

Step 6
Leave it a day or two and return to each of your posts, login and edit the post to include your link!

Great, a free link with my chosen keywords as the anchor text from a PR2 internal page!

Top Tips

  • Ensure the thread you’re looking at has only one page worth of posts, so that when you make your post, you’re also on the page with PR :)
  • Take the time to write a relevant on-topic post. These are free, reasonable quality links and worth putting the few minutes of time! If your first post is spammy or “Wow, great thread!” then it will be removed as spam within minutes on most forums.
  • Most of the threads with PR will be reasonably old, this is because toolbar PR obviously only gets updated every now and then. As such you should come up with a convincing reason for why you’re dragging up a post that is 3 months or even 3 years old! The way to do this is to associate yourself with the thing being discussed, if someone is talking about a problem then describe how you have the same problem and even if there’s a solution, state that it doesn’t help you and request further advice.
  • The longer you can leave the post without editing it the better. If you leave it for a short amount of time only then there is a chance someone will notice the edit and report you to the administrator. Be aware that some forum software does put a time restriction on how long you have before you can edit a post, I haven’t ran into this problem many times.
  • Mix up your search in step 2 so that you don’t hit the same forums as other people.

Side note
Because I’m making this blog post, there is a good chance that the owner of the forum I used as an example will notice and remove the link. Don’t be put off by this :)

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16 Comments »

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  1. Great post Esrun, as usual the simple things are the most effective, just takes someone like you to think of it :)

    Comment by Chewie — 10th July, 2008 #

  2. Thanks for the post. Is there a tool out there where i can enter a google query and it gets me the sites with pr? I have such a tool for blogger.com but no universal one.

    Comment by megaschorsch — 10th July, 2008 #

  3. No problem :) I’m not sure if there’s a tool out there although I imagine there will be. The tool would either perform a site search in google, use yahoo site explorer or manually spider the site. It only takes 2 secs to do this manuually as per step 3. You can restrict your search to just threads on the forum by making a specific search per forum platform. For example, if checking a vBulletin forum you might use this search: site:http://www.oldversion.com/talk inurl:showthread.php

    Comment by admin — 10th July, 2008 #

  4. isn’t it better to just add a signature with the link in it? less spammy…

    Comment by ammy — 10th July, 2008 #

  5. Ammy, not really no. If you signup to a forum and put a link in your signature then make just one post… guess what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna get your post and account deleted. If you mean, make the first post then come back and add a signature later, well I guess you could do but there’s a chance of forum owners searching signatures of members with links, they wont do this on posts since there would be too many to manually review :)

    Comment by admin — 10th July, 2008 #

  6. its all about using a pr parser for google - that combined with a good query means ur laughing - just don’t do this so blatently everyone looses the good urls though…

    Comment by underworld — 10th July, 2008 #

  7. Nice on Esrun!

    Comment by webprofessor — 10th July, 2008 #

  8. Ammy, another good reason to have it in a post and not a signature is that when auto-archiving occurs on most forums, it does NOT take the signature with it. This means that there will be a username and the message only, rendering the effort a tad useless. I do see where you’re coming from though :)

    Comment by DarkKnightH20 — 11th July, 2008 #

  9. Isn’t there a VBulletin autoposter out there somewhere? Have any plans of coding something like that Esrun? :)

    Comment by FakeStuff — 12th July, 2008 #

  10. I have made similar software before yes. One for signing up to get links on profile pages and another to make actual posts on the forum. While you could automate this, I don’t think there’s any point. It takes a matter of 5 minutes maximum per link. If you automate it then chances are your relpies to the existing posts aren’t going to naturally fit in and will be removed. It’s better to just take the time and do it manually. Or just pay someone else to do it :)

    Comment by admin — 13th July, 2008 #

  11. Thanks for the post Esrun! You see a lot of people that tell you to post to bulletins and blogs but I particularly like the tip of posting and coming back later and changing it.

    Comment by Chris — 13th July, 2008 #

  12. Hey this is off topic for this post but I got a question for you. Does the xml feel link generator work?

    I installed it and the only thing that works on it is the keyword scraper. But when I try to add keywords and then check the keyword list, you can’t do it. Nothing works.

    I was really anxious to use that script too! Is there anything you could tell me about it? Some things to watch out for when installing it?

    It seemed like an easy install to me. I was happy when I saw it there but totally disappointed when it didn’t work. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

    Comment by mary — 27th July, 2008 #

  13. Thanks for help, it’s very helpful metod to gain some PR.

    Comment by sushi bydgoszcz — 16th August, 2008 #

  14. Hey Esrun

    Found your site and was interested in some of the tips.

    This one is scuppered by the short edit time limits , 10-30 mins, put on many boards. Do you have any tips for finding out whether it is worth posting on a board that might lock you out in half and hour?

    Thanks in advance.

    Comment by pat23 — 3rd September, 2008 #

  15. Hi Pat, some forums do indeed impose this. Depends on the forum software, some are better to target than others. Also depends on how modern the software is. When done on busy forums you can usually get away with slipping a link in within those 30 mins anyway…

    Comment by admin — 9th September, 2008 #

  16. […] posted about a way to get free pr backlinks a while back. Here is a snippet from that post: The basic idea is to look for forum posts which […]

    Pingback by dinkstyle.com » Backlinks Magic with Magic Backlinks — 10th October, 2008 #

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