Backlink SEO technique
I’ve been looking at 360cities.net since the start of the year. The site allows you to upload high quality images and automatically stitch it together to make cool panoramas.
SEO techniques
I like how 360cities have optimized their site for search engines. “Panoramic” keyword derivatives are highly competitive. So 360cities doesn’t only optimize for “panoramic software” (which has high relevance, but decreasing trend) but also for “360 photography” (which is becoming a more popular search term).
The fact that they are on DMOZ also helps their rankings. But what really sets them apart is off-site optimization. With a whopping +127,000 backlinks to the site (yes that many!) helps them appear on the first page of almost all relevant search results.
Backlink is key
What I like about their service model is how backlinking is inherently built-in. Look at the flash container I plugged into this post earlier. I got an embedded interactive panorama on my page (very cool!), but at the same time I gave 360cities a backlink as well. Now imagine thousands of users doing that and giving 360cities a little push on the google ranking system. Pretty cool, eh?
Off-site Ideas
This is what you need to think about when you think of SEO. The challenge is to come up with an ingenious way to entice users to backlink to your site. For example try running viral campaigns with a funny video or a flash game. Another technique is to have “powered by” logos, but this only works if your brand has prestige. I’ve also seen twitter/youtube promotions for people who successfully backlink (can look a bit lame). The best idea is to inherently embed the backlink as part of your service, very much like what 360cities has done.
Kari
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Backlinks are a good way to increase page ranking. But you’ve to be careful not to get backlinks from bad sites. Known link farms, etc are such bad sites and Google can penalize you by demoting your site.
Zaki Usman
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Kari, thats a good point. But this wouldnt be a link farm type of an activity. Here your individual users/visitors/customers would be backlinking in a legitimate way. So the chances of being penalized are a lot lower.
Sarat Jose
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Thank you for sharing this. Ive also heard about the ‘follow’ ‘nofollow’ backlinks that can devalue your website.
Zaki Usman
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Thats a good question. Not all backlinks are of equal value. Some message boards/forums are designed to add the “nofollow” link to any mentioned links in the forum. This is to discourage spammers from submitting useless links to forums in the hopes of building backlinks. Google doesnt value the ‘nofollow” links as much as the regular links. I’m not sure how much ratio you can have before you start to get into trouble. I’ve found some links that may be of interest:
http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/259098-nofollow-backlinks-google.html
http://www.qondio.com/are-nofollow-backlinks-worthless
http://backlinksforum.com/page-seo-discussion-forum/1075-dofollow-nofollow.html
Phil Mattisen
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Other than on-page SEO, what other factors should I consider in improving my Google Pagerank? How important is the quality of incoming backlinks? I have recently launched a campaign to generate backlinks to my site from low quality domains. Some have indicated that it may be counter-productive to my site since these low quality links will be penalized. Can anyone elaborate?
Ravi Chilav
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With the updates from Penguin and Panada, backlinks are even more important than ever before!
Sharma K.
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Backlinks are no longer relevant if you hear/see whats going on with Panda and Penguin updates. The new “backlink” is a social share. What are your thoughts on that?