B6S.net

Just when you think we’ve seen it all, a new social media application comes along and wham! it rocks the Internet, getting its founders into the digital Hall of Fame. When it seems the online arena is densely populated with huge corporations, is it still possible for you to come up with the next big thing on the Internet? Can your idea be the one that rocks the Internet?

There are so many factors at play, but I really enjoyed Robert Scoble’s recent post highlighting an interesting aspect of successful social media applications: addictiveness:

The social behavior incentive (how your app can be as addictive as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare)

The basic idea is, make your application into a competitive game. Let your users work their way towards titles, figured and new records. Scoble provides some excellent detailed tips on how to achieve just that and do read the comments there as well – there some gems that complement the original post and inject more insights into building a great social media application/website.

I can think about many websites that implement this line of thought. Take Squidoo and Hub Pages, with their scoring systems; Social bookmarking sites with their voting system; Forums with the popular hacks for points, karma, or simply the user title ladder.

The rewards system works. We enjoy building our virtual social media profiles as if they were our character in WOW.  Keep it in mind if you want to get into the social media game and be “the next big thing”.

Working on my crochet projects lately, I decided to watch this year’s Thirty Days Challenge videos. I was curious to see what Ed Dale and his people are teaching newbies nowadays and wanted to see if there were any tidbits I might find useful.

I was surprised to see just how much effort was still placed on building backlinks from free hosted services. Dale recommends building pages for your main site from Squidoo, Hub Pages, Weebly, Blogger, Wordpress.com and Scribd. The video guides talk about throwing as many hooks into the water as you can, implying, presumably, that these efforts are focused at getting surfers directly from these services. However, they do mention, quite often, that this should also be part of your link building strategy – getting quality backlinks from your own on-topic pages from these respectable (authority?) websites.

Theoretically, it’s a brilliant idea, and certainly not new. It sounds so good, doesn’t it? By putting in a few hours of work, you can generate on-topic links, all from “good neighborhoods”, with your anchor text of choice. No need to negotiate with other webmasters – just log into your account and create your page and your link.

Is It Worth Your Time Though?

My Own Backlinks from Free Hosted Pages Experiment

I have tried this myself two and a half years ago, launching a series of pages on Squidoo, Blogpost (Blogger), Hub Pages and Google Pages. Don’t laugh, but Yahoo Geocities and Angelfire (Lycos) were respectable free hosting services back then too – with many of their pages taking top positions in the SERP’s – so they were incorporated into my linking scheme as well.

Focusing my efforts on promoting three quality content websites, I built these backlinks pages  gradually, over several months. There was nothing spammy about them either. I suck at spam and find it very difficult to write total drivel (although I suppose some might disgree!), so each of these pages, whether moderated ones on Hub Pages or Free-For-All on Angelfire, got my full attention. They were beautiful pages, with rich meaningful text, pictures and even some design where necessary. They were interlinked to some extent, and I threw in some more links for good measure from my own directories (that was back when directory links still carried some weight).

I monitored the results for a while and still take a peak every now and again.

The results were mixed and, as far as I’m concerned, disappointing:

1. All of the pages were indexed and still are.
2. The links to my main pages are still there and counted as backlinks to my main sites.
3. Naturally, the amount of traffic to these free-hosted pages is minimal. They target some long-tail search phrases, and as far as I can tell, have very limited success in scoring high on the SERP’s for those (with the exception of a few of them, mainly the ones on Hub Pages).
4. Most importantly, I could see little to no effect on the main sites they were supposed to push forward.

So Was It Worth My Time?

Well, you could say that a backlink is a backlink, but I really don’t think this works as a viable long-term link building strategy. It is too time-consuming to be worth the effort, especially when you consider you will need to promote these “satellite pages” to give them any SEO significance as a source of links.

For myself, I feel that my time is better spent creating natural organic links and keeping my quality content in my own network.