How to Find Link Partners for Your Website

It's not a secret that link exchange can be a very exhausting process, especially when you need to find link partners that are related to the subject of your website. This article will help speed up your link building process and make it much more effective.
Websites with Link Submission Forms

A link submission form is the easiest way to exchange links online. All you have to do is enter your website information and the reciprocal link URL. After submission, your link exchange can be completed within minutes (but usually the next day or sometimes even in a week or a month).

There are a lot of free and paid solutions to create reciprocal directories with the link submission form. Two examples are Link Machine (http://linkmachine.net) and Link Partners (http://linkpartners.com). Some of your potential link partners might have these link directories installed on their websites. Our aim is to find all of the sites that are powered by a certain type of link directory solution.

Let's take a look at LinkPartners' powered link directory here: http://www.skin-protection.com/l-nks/add-link.htm And also here: http://www.rockymountaingourmetsteaks.com/l-nks/add-link.htm. As you can see, this is a default (but slightly modified) template for the page with a link submission form. The question is - What text string in this template will be common for ALL of LinkPartners' powered directories? The answer is - "Please also suggest my link to the LinkPartners.com Directory."

We can use the same trick with Link Machine's powered directory. In this case, the common text string is - "Powered By LinkMachine".

So, for example, if you want to find all websites related to coffee and powered by LinkPartners, just open Google and search for: "intitle:coffee" +"Please also suggest my link to the LinkPartners.com Directory."

Why enter "intitle:coffee" instead of just "coffee"? A website with "coffee" in the page title can be much more relevant to your subject compared to a website where "coffee" can be found just 1 or 2 times on the page.
Websites with Links Pages

What should we do if our potential link partner doesn't have one of the prevalent link directories installed? This is not a problem.

If there is a Links or Resources page on the website, we can find it easily by searching for the word "Links", "Resources", or "Directory" in the page text or in the page title: "intitle:coffee +links" or "intitle:Directory +coffee". Sure, you can enter "coffee links" or "coffee directory", but keep in mind you'll get a huge quantity of irrelevant sites in the search results.
Below is a list of keywords that can be used when searching for link pages:

* Add a link
* Add site
* Add a site
* Add URL
* Add a URL
* Ads
* Advertiser Testimonials
* Article
* Articles
* Blog
* Blogs
* Buy Links
* Directory
* Directories
* Donate
* Donation
* Donations
* Ezine
* Ezine Ads
* Links
* Merchants
* Newsletter
* Newsletter Ads
* Rent Links
* Resources
* Related sites
* Related urls
* Sites
* Sponsors
* Sponsorship
* Submit a link
* Submit a site
* Submit URL
* Submit an URL
* Suggest a link
* Suggest a site
* Suggest URL
* Suggest an URL
* Thanks to Our Sponsors
* Tips
* Vendors
* Weblog
* Websites

Websites with Specific URLs

Some websites have specific URLs for their link pages - i.e. links.html, add_link.html, add_site.html. You can find these kinds of websites by going to Google and doing a search for "inurl:links" or "inurl:add_link".
Watch Your Competitors

This is a very old trick that is still useful today. Search for your keyword in Google and look at the top 10 or top 20 sites in the search results. Then just copy their link building strategy by determining which sites are linking to them and putting your link on those sites. The easiest way is to take your competitor's links page and try to have a reciprocal link exchange with all of the sites mentioned on this page. You can also apply this strategy to your link partners.
Link Exchange Software

Submitting manual link forms can be very slow. However, you can use special software that is designed to make the link exchange process easy and fast.
1. Related Link Suggestion Tool from Aaron Wall

This is a free online tool that can be used to find related links. It is based on the techniques described above.
2. AllSubmitter

This is a semi-automatic and automatic form submission tool. It imports the URLs database and then submits it automatically in minutes. This tool has an interesting feature - it can check your URLs database for Google PR, so you can concentrate on high-PR sites and save your time.
3. ARELIS

This is a great tool for link exchange management - finding link partners, finding and submitting link forms, emailing your link exchange requests to webmasters, and generating HTML link pages that can be placed on your site.
4. SEO Elite

Another link management tool developed by Brad Callen, a well-known expert in the SEO industry, is SEO Elite. It can analyze your competitor's or your own link strategy, find and submit to LinkPartners.com's powered directories, and email link exchange requests to several webmasters simultaneously.
5. LinkAssistant

This tool can find link partners for your site and manage the link exchange process. Just enter your niche's keywords and let LinkAssistant do the rest. LinkAssistant's developers claim: "LinkAssistant offers 5 to 12 more essential link building features than any other SEO tool you might have tried in the past."
6. WebCEO

WebCEO is a complex software system that is designed for all-in-one SEO, not for link management only. However, it is able to find link partners by keywords, and send automatic link exchange requests to chosen webmasters. Also, it can analyze which sites are linking to you or your competitor.
Some Unethical Ways to Leave Your Link

Sometimes when working in areas such as pharmacy or adult material, you need tons of links to work your way into the top 10 rankings. This is when unethical link-building strategies come into to play. These strategies can violate search engine rules and use weaknesses in ranking algorithms. That's why these techniques should only be used when you definitely can't move your site to the top by using legal methods and you're not afraid of being banned.

Disclaimer: The information below is for educational purposes only. I am not responsible for possible search engine ranking penalties to your site as a result of unethical link building. Your site can be banned from search engines (since it is violation of their rules), and you should realize that BEFORE trying to implement these techniques.
Link Spamming

Link Spamming is a massive link submission technique that is implemented exclusively for higher search engine ranking purposes. It exploits Google's algorithm that gives the highest ranking to a website that has the greatest number of other websites linking to it. For link spamming, it is typical to use automatic scripts for link submission to the sites that have submission forms and cannot control them - guestbooks, forums, blog comments, article comments, etc.

You can find the guestbooks and blogs using the same way we found the sites with specific URLs. Each guestbook type shares a common part in the URL. For example, the Viper Guestbook always has "vipergb" in the URL. So, you have to search for "inurl:vipergb" in Google to find these kinds of guestbooks.

For automatic link spamming, StoneDiver MultiSubmitter is recommended. It is free software and can be downloaded here. Before spamming, make sure you are operating through a proxy.

People are protecting their resources from link spamming with CAPTCHA - a computer generated image that contains a security code that cannot be recognized by automatic scripts.
Referral Spamming

Let's use Google to search for something like this: "webalizer stats December". What you see in the search results are the websites that for some reason publicize their access logs with the referrer statistics:http://www.cjfearnley.com/stats/webalizer/usage_200512.html. Click "Referrers" and you'll be able to see the URLs from which this website was requested.

You can place your link into this table by using a script that makes repeated website requests with a fake referrer URL pointing to an advertised site. So the next webalizer report will have your link included and indexed by the search engine.

The website can be protected from referral spamming by putting a special code in the .htaccess file.
Forum Profile Spamming

There are a lot of PHPBB based forums. They have one interesting feature - a separate page for each registered user profile, similar to this: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=111644. And what is more interesting is that this page can be indexed by search engines. The "Website" field can be filled with a link to your site. So, all you have to do is just register where you can and leave a link. This also can be done by using an automatic script. The forums can be found by searching for "inurl:profile.php" in Google.

Forums can be protected from Profile Spamming by implementing CAPTCHA and other specific tricks such as "stop words" lists and disabling some registration fields.
Conclusion

There are 2 sides of link building, "white-hat" and "black-hat". Usually "white-hat" works fine, especially when you have a serious website that has interesting and relevant content. However, sometimes you can use "black-hat" techniques if your site is not good enough to be promoted in the usual ways.

About the Author

Sam Kerzhnerman is a SEO expert at IDEUS web design studio. He runs a SEO Blog with useful links, articles and SEO-related software reviews.