Wordpress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links

Post image for Wordpress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links
Michael Gray

By Michael Gray on September 16th, 2009
In SEO  

Print Post Print Post Email Post Email Post    ADD TO STUMBLEUPON Sphinn It ADD TO DEL.ICIO.US  Tweet This

When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

The first step you need to take is to make sure you are publishing a full feed. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as publishing a full feed will actually encourage more people to scrape your feed, but that’s exactly what you want to happen.

Next you’ll need the RSS Footer plugin from Joost de Valk. By default the plugin links back to your home page with the name of your blog, and back to the individual post with the post title as the anchor text. This helps the search engines figure out who is the source of the blog post.

However you can take this plugin to a whole new level by also adding in links to different parts of your blog (or another website) with the anchor text that you put in. Initially I used this plugin in test mode to help me rank for the term [seo blog]. Once I had established that worked as proof of concept it was on to something more competitive. I’m now using it help me rank for the phrase [seo consultant].

Some important aspects of using this strategy, you don’t want to leave the anchor text, links, or surrounding text in place to long, you want to change it somewhere between every 30-90 days. This helps your backlink profile look more natural, and helps the scrapers from filtering out your links with pattern matching. Second go ahead and use it to build links for commercial terms, but don’t be greedy about it. Stuffing it full of  30 links pretty much shines a big spotlight on what you are doing, keeping it down to to 2-4 links keeps it from attracting too much attention.

Related posts:

  1. Wordpress SEO: Wordpress Security Why it Matters to SEO In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack...
  2. Wordpress SEO: How to Maximize Your Internal Link Strategy While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing...
  3. Wordpress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure For this post we’re going to be taking  look at...

Crazyegg Link Tracking

Comments on this entry are closed.