In many of the popular webmaster related forums you can usually find a section on link sales. Yes, backlinks are the holy grail of SEO these days, but did you know that many of these paid links are absolutely worthless? Let me explain in more detail…

Let’s face it, Google is a master at analyzing data. From Google analytics to their own algorithm, Google does a pretty darn good job at crunching the number and detailing data. And part of their technology is devoted to identifying paid links. How does Google do it? Of course that is open to debate, but let me share some of my opinions and you make your own call.

A while back it was easy to get an edu link from Harvard.  The problem is that they introduced captcha and their was an error with it, so that blocked Webmasters from submitting more links.  Apparently they used this time to clean up their site and rid it of the oubound links.  Well, that captcha problem has been corrected and do-follow Harvard links are now available once again.

Here’s how Webmasters are doing it….

1. Visit this URL: http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/
2. Select create playlist
3. Click register
4. Enter name, E-mail, and password (E-mail verification is not required)
5. Click register
6. Click add/edit playlist info
7. Add your title, description, and tags (more tags will get more backlinks)
8. Click update

There are quite a few ways to get backlinks, but unmoderated guestbooks are often overlooked or thought of as an ancient link building method.  Believe it or not, guestbooks are still around and many of them have the cherished pagerank so many webmasters seek.

First, the key to discovering guestbooks is to look for a search operator that will help you find plenty of them.  Searching for “sign guestbook” at Google will return a large list of guestbooks.  Or a search of “guestbook.html” will also return a list of guestbooks once you get past the first page.  For most, it’s probably easier to search for specific guestbook scripts (ones known to not be moderated).  Below are some search phrases I used.