Using Footprints For Accurate, Efficient & Better Link Building

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

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://jatinsharma.in/ will show all the indexed pages from within the particular website, in other words it will show all pages that precede with http://jatinsharma.in/.

‘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 separatorfor 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 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 ourwebsite 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 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.