Using Footprints For Accurate, Efficient & Better Link Building

Saturday, July 31, 2010 2:20
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I’ve been into seo for a long while now. My specialty includes link building and the one very important factor which ‘most’ of the link builders don’t make use of is Google’s Advanced search alongwith ‘footprints’. Now there are two terms i need to explain here.

  1. Google’s Advanced/Customized Search
  2. Footprints

Google’s Advanced/Customized Search

This may not be the right word to indicate what i’m saying but its close to being accurate. You may have heard of ‘Google Codes’ that can be used within a search query. To mention some we have

  • intitle
  • inurl
  • inanchor
  • intext
  • site

Basically ‘inanchor’, ‘intitle’ are used while doing competition analysis.

’site’ which is used as site:http://techfrog.org/ will show all the indexed pages from within the particular website, in other words it will show all pages that precede with http://techfrog.org/.

‘intitle’ is used in the following manner, i.e. intitle:"dog food". What this basically does is that it will gather all the results that contain the words ‘dog food’ in their title.

‘inurl’ when used as inurl:"dogs and cats" will return results that contain ‘dogs-and-cats’ in the url(web address) of the page. Remember that the hyphen(’-') is the primary space separator for urls.

‘intext’ when used as intext:"dogs and cats" will get you all the pages that contain the terms ‘dogs and cats’ within the text of the page.

Footprints

Footprints are the unique identity of an entity that are existent anywhere at anytime. We as humans have fingerprints that are unique and stay the same wherever we may go unless ofcource if they have been manipulated manually. Similarly all the major website platforms like Wordpress, Drupal & Joomla have their own unique footprints that can be identified on various websites that make use of these platforms.

These footprints can be used to search pages on the web which belong to only a particular platform. E.g. Wordpress’ footprints can be used to search websites that are build only on wordpress. We can put this to use because Wordpress and Drupal as platforms give the users the freedom to comment on various posts and articles. We can include our links within these comments so as to build backlinks for our website.

Wordpress

Wordpress Comments

Wordpress Comments

Wordpress is the largest blogging platform on the web and has millions of webpages to its credit. The best thing about wordpress for us linkbuilders is that comments are enabled by default and are present on every post. The ‘Website’ field also lets us place our website URL which ultimately helps in linkbuilding. The standard comment system format is as in the image aside.

The following footprints can be used to find wordpress pages where comments are open.

  • ‘Leave a Reply’ ‘Name (required)’ ‘Mail (will not be published) (required)’ ‘Website’
  • “Notify me of follow-up comments via email” “Mail (will not be published)”
  • “Leave a Comment” “Name” “Website”
  • “powered by wordpress”

The last footprint is more of a generalized one which will not necessarily give you refined results as it will also include the homepage and other pages of a wordpress blog on which there is no comment facility.

We can use these footprints with our customized Google search to get our desired pages. Now consider you have a primary keyword “quality dog food”. Let us search for pages on wordpress that can be commented upon that have the text ‘quality dog food’ either within the url, title or text. We enter the following query into google that gives us 3420, 121 results respectively

‘Leave a Reply’ ‘Name (required)’ ‘Mail (will not be published) (required)’ ‘Website’ intext:”quality dog food”

‘Leave a Reply’ ‘Name (required)’ ‘Mail (will not be published) (required)’ ‘Website’ intitle:”quality dog food”

‘Leave a Reply’ ‘Name (required)’ ‘Mail (will not be published) (required)’ ‘Website’ inurl:”quality dog food”

If we do the math, we have got 3421+121+107-(approx 50 common pages)=3599 targeted, keyword specific commentable pages based on wordpress in no time. If you happen to have the Ultimate Wordpress Comment Spammer, you can do the job of posting on autopilot.

Drupal

Drupal Comments

Drupal Comments

Drupal is a content management system which is also used widely. It also supports comments which are present in almost every page by default. Many Educational miniblogs on the .edu domain use Drupal, as an example you can consider psu.edu which has tons of dofollow High PR & commentable backlinks. Drupal has two major footprints that can help us find its pages anywhere on the web. It is as shown below :

  • “Login or register to comment”
  • “Login or register to post comments”

As you’ve learn’t in the wordpress section, you can use these footprints in the same way to find some keyword relevant pages for you to comment on. You may have heard that backlinks from .edu and .gov sites hold more weightage/importance. How true this is, we don’t know. Anyways, we can use the following query to find pages on Drupal on a .edu or .gov site specific to a given keyword.

site:.edu “Login or register to post comments” inurl:”my keyword”

site:.gov “Login or register to comment” inurl:”my keyword”

Note : Make sure you don’t copy-paste the search query’s above but type them yourselves as the text-formatting/encoding here is different from what your keyboard will produce on Google’s saerch bar.

I personally prefer Drupal for linkbuilding as it has an ace over wordpress. Here are some basic differences between Wordpress and Drupal which you should know.

Wordpress

  • Comment Links Are Nofollow By Default
  • Can Comment as a Guest
  • Link Can be placed Within Comment text or in the ‘Website’ field with the anchor text in the ‘name’ field.
  • Better Anti-spam Protection

Drupal

  • Comment Links are Dofollow by default
  • Need To Register To comment
  • Links need to be placed Within the Comment body in HTML
  • Comparatively Poorer Anti-spam protection

You can research and find your own footprints. These alongwith Google’s customized search is a Link Builder’s Best Tool.

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23 Responses to “Using Footprints For Accurate, Efficient & Better Link Building”

  1. link building services says:

    August 3rd, 2010 at 5:27 AM

    As this post illustrates, it’s definitely better to comment on Drupal posts than Wordpress posts because Drupal posts are do follow. This obviously makes a big difference when it comes to the ability to use commenting to affect rankings.

  2. Dennis A says:

    August 5th, 2010 at 9:19 AM

    great.. it seems that drupal is better than wordpress.. but if i am using scrapebox to post comments what would be the comment mode i shoul use… it is Movable type?

  3. Apolonia Drown says:

    August 7th, 2010 at 1:52 AM

    I like Wordpress more.

  4. Daniel - SEO Specialist says:

    August 14th, 2010 at 4:54 AM

    HeyTechFrog, I really appreciate this post on footprints. I have never heard of the term before until now! This will definitely help me with my seo efforts with the knowledge his blog post has given me. I have tried wordpress and drupal. I really love Wordpress and I hate Drupal for my own CMS purposes. But now I know that Drupal is better for link building reasons due to the dofollow link attribute. Thanks for the great tips! Daniel Tetreault.

  5. seo company uk says:

    September 9th, 2010 at 12:17 PM

    Drupal is more customized than wordpress and from the SEO perspective, all the plug-ins in Drupal is more advanced than the wordpress version as well.

  6. Seo Services Company - Humanoids India says:

    September 21st, 2010 at 10:45 AM

    I really like your this page and looking forward for the further information.

  7. Link Building - Felipa Guzmdn says:

    September 29th, 2010 at 9:22 AM

    I couldn’t agree more. So where do you find the best link building services?

  8. DoFollowBlogger says:

    November 7th, 2010 at 4:32 PM

    Hi !

    English is not my motherlanguage , so that i am very satified with your posting. Thx for the hint with drupal footprints.

    HELP:
    are there any ppl outhere that can give me foreign language footprints for comments sites?

    i can give you a nice list with german wordpress footprints if you give me the footprints from your country.

    greetings from germany
    DoFollowBlogger

  9. Peter @ Buy RX says:

    November 11th, 2010 at 6:06 AM

    OK, so I actually came here after searching for joomla footprints but nothing mentioned about that. Anyone knows if there are any good ones for the components JComments and JA Comment for instance? In either case thanks for pointing out a couple of more footprints besides the ones I already knew :)

  10. NABERS says:

    December 4th, 2010 at 9:11 AM

    It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

  11. Lloyd says:

    December 23rd, 2010 at 4:40 PM

    Interesting. But as for me I prefer Joomla. It’s free and has all the instruments and plugins for SEO I need.

  12. oneninetwo says:

    January 5th, 2011 at 12:42 AM

    Thanks for the footprint tips. It’s getting more and more popular it seems.

  13. sandipan@inkjam says:

    January 17th, 2011 at 2:46 PM

    I have been into blogging for quite some time now and I can tell you with some authority that these are the best seo tips I have ever read. Simple and easy to understand. All I can say is Hats Off To You.

  14. seo says:

    February 27th, 2011 at 4:57 PM

    good stuff to add to me footprint section.
    only problem is finding blogs which are auto approve as most of them trigger spam when manually insert comment.

  15. Oncelot Directory says:

    May 9th, 2011 at 8:36 AM

    I used to have wordpress and joomla for my blogs. I guess i have to try drupal too so that I can compare which is the best among of them..=)

  16. marketing agencies london says:

    June 9th, 2011 at 2:45 PM

    Searching a potential and relevant site is the main trick of SEO and the tips like “intitle”, “inurl” etc. to find absolute perfect site for link building is very useful and most authentic. I desperately believe that the tips would certainly help all the SEO guy who are on any quality link building campaign.

  17. biography of scientists says:

    June 30th, 2011 at 12:27 AM

    I am a beginner in this field but this post has give me a hope and a knowledge about what i have been searching.THANKS TO YOU.

  18. Delray says:

    July 6th, 2011 at 9:40 AM

    Thanks for this info. I’m a newbie and just beginning to get into SEO. This was hellpful

  19. executive gifts says:

    July 20th, 2011 at 9:17 AM

    One Way Link Building is considered as the most effective way to increase your website’s value. This will undoubtedly help in establishing a good reputation for your website online.

  20. 500 Word Articles says:

    August 3rd, 2011 at 8:58 AM

    Wow I never knew there was an inanchor and intitle query. Awesome article! Bookmarked in my “Useful IM Info” folder.

    Cheers!

  21. SaleC says:

    August 24th, 2011 at 12:37 AM

    Footprints are very important and time-savers.After just 5 days of reading about how to use them (including this post) i have better results in backlinking.Indexing is  &V%* but that`s another subject :)

  22. ปราจีนบุรี says:

    September 11th, 2011 at 5:59 PM

    Thanks a lot. Very useful for me.

  23. Lava Infotech says:

    October 28th, 2011 at 11:25 AM

    I have a Joomla site and was thinking what better can I get for SEO through a content management system? But, after going through Drupal I have realized that this is even more SEO friendly.

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