Linkbuilding Tips

This PRO tip is an accompaniment to my latest blog post on linkbuilding. You should read that post first to understand what I'm talking about. This tip is actually just a bunch of extra ideas, tips and tricks which go hand in hand with the idea I outlined in the post:

Try finding lists of recently bankrupt companies. A list like that would be a goldmine of domains which used to offer a service/product and no longer do. Buy their domains or update their links. The choice is yours! Try here, here or here to get you started.

Do you run a UK-based restaurant review site? Here's one of the easiest links you'll ever get (and why not take a look at the page's backlinks while you're at it?!)

Wondering how this tip applies to blog linkbuilding? Run some searches for people who've stopped blogging (a simple search for ["stopped blogging"] seemed to work quite well for me - be sure to add some modifiers to find blogs in your industry), find the root blog page, see who's blogroll they're on and contact them asking if you could be included as well/instead of the guy who no longer blogs. Be sure to point out that your blog is still regularly updated! :-)

Once you've found a large site which has one expired page then see what terminology they use and construct some more detailed site: queries to find all the expired services/pages on that site. Here's one I found earlier site:guardian.co.uk "video is no longer available"

For the more heavy duty SEO guys out there, why not build a tool which spiders a site's backlinks and returns a list of all links which point at a 404 page on that site? Those links are just waiting to be harvested right? Point the tool at a big popular site in your niche and away you go.
Try spidering niche web directories for any external 404 links (Xenu will do this for you).

If you can find a directory in your niche then you're all set! The bigger the directory the better.
Where a company used to offer services in multiple countries but has since stopped offering the services in a specific country, use the Yahoo region tool (detailed in this PRO tip) to find all the links from to the site from the country they no longer serve. The recent anti-online-poker legislation in the US is a perfect example of this. Try this query on for size:

link:http://www.pacificpoker.com region:northamerica (Pacific Poker was one of the sites which has withdrawn from the US following the legislation). In fact, there's loads of poker links up for grabs, searching for shutting down us legislation inurl:poker allowed me to find this page:

http://www.pokerboycott.org/unfriendly.htm which in turn allowed me to find this site:

http://www.jetsetpoker.com/ which has completely folded since the legislation came into effect. Yahoo reports around 500 links to the domain.