Winner Update: Holger from Wakefiles.com won this contest. We had to spend some time testing to see if many of the social media site submitted were valid and actually provided a back link from a profile or similar page. One of my link builders confirmed this today, so congradulations Holger on making a quick $500! I'll repost the full list after they are all confirmed.

Contest Post: Let's make this into a contest. Whoever adds the most social media and/or online profile-type sites other than the ones already listed in this post wins $500 in cash.

Rules - Sites submitted must offer back links (anchor text with URL or URL link only). The contest ends May 15th at 5pm EST. You can come back as many times as you wish and add more sites in a different comment post (of course using the same username/email in your comments so we can tally up your total links submitted over the next two weeks). Good luck!

Building Links Through Social Profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks and cast your net wider on the Internet is through social media profile building. However, not all profile sites are created equally in terms of SEO value. Some profiles don’t allow any links back to your site while others offer URL links and anchor text.

I’ve done some digging into a the profiles of a few top rated social sites to find which ones offered links in the public profile:

Definition: Hosted marketing pages (HMP) aka presell pages are unique pages purchased on relevant, non-competitive web sites that allow links within the content, aka contextual linking "under the radar."

Hosted marketing pages are becoming a popular trend and can be very valuable if you can land your content and links on the right web sites. It's essential to spend some time analyzing each potential prospect and know what to look for using a basic approach.

In this post I'll highlight some tips on how to research, rate, and make the offer on hosted marketing pages. Search engines despise this as much as any kind of link building, but if you can purchase HMP's effectively enough, you'll almost always receive a huge ROI and quite possibly not have to pay for the recurring monthly fees associated with presell pages. Here's how you can get started...

There's a lot of different opinions surrounding Wikipedia's super power success in nearly every search engine. They dominate rankings and will continue to do so until there are better filters to "weed out" pages that are limited in "Wiki" standards. But I don't see Google and other search engines finding a successful formula that will ever really filter deep content pages from a domain like Wikipedia. This would have to be a manual process and I don't feel anyone wants that job. ;-\

But until there are negative changes with Wikipedia's rankings in the search engines, you can use these top 5 methods for gaming using Wikipedia to build your site's credibility and rankings.

I wish we could've made it to SES this week in San Jose, but with lots of new projects lately, I suppose we'll just have to settle on living vicariously through others. On that note, I've been reading a lot of good notes about Google's position with paid links from attendees at the SES sessions this week. After reading a few really good posts on Google's stance on paid links by Rand from SEOMoz as well as Bruce Clay, I'll have to say I'm not surprised at all about the feedback from both sides - Google and webmasters. Google still stands behind their assessments of paid links that pass link juice such as those from paid blog review sites we wrote about in our list of blog advertising sites several weeks ago.

Sometimes the easier options of creative good quality backlinks is overlooked. Buying links or trying to email back and forth to only end up paying $500/mo. for one or two re-occuring links is way over rated. This kind of link building can run into the hundreds or thousands each month. In most cases, why bother?

We discovered a newer version of a popular search operator this afternoon to help web owners view a much larger number of backlinks and on-page references (like SEOposition.com w/o the anchor) from Google. It used to be very easy to view your backlinks in Google using the link: operator but this old method only gives a partial list of total backlinks that link to your site and is by no means a comprehensive look at your total number of backlinks.

Since this new back links method will likely be a temporary loophole, here's how to view your total number of back links in Google using the new method.