Link Building Strategies using Search Commands

If you're managing link building for a client or your own website, here's a quick primer on link building strategies to find only quality sites related to your niche. To start, let's say the website you're building link prospects for focuses on "Mexico travel." In this case some of your initial Google search commands to build link prospects or related advertising enquiries on those sites would include:

Search Command Allinurl:

• "allinurl:mexico travel" (typed this in Google without the quotes to find sites with "mexico" and "travel" within the URL).
• "allinurl:mexico tourism" (don't forget other very important related keyword and other search variations that can prove valuable to your link building campaign)

Search Command Allintitle:

• "allintitle:mexico travel" (close to the same as above but searching for keywords found within the title tags of the page. Be sure to also use variations of keywords along with "Mexico as mentioned above, i.e. tourism, vacations, etc)
• "allintitle:drupal travel" (a bit more loosely related but could provide a few useful resources to list for link prospecting)

*A Bit more Fancy with Allinurl:

If you're looking to receive links back through commenting on other sites with the ability for visitors to leave comments without using "rel=nofollow" then you can get a little more creative. WordPress by default includes the rel=nofollow tag, so don't waste your time there. However, there are a bunch of content management systems that do not include the rel=nofollow such as Drupal. So, using the same basic keywords or related phrases, let's locate some places we can potentially get comment links:

• "allinurl:q=node travel" (this search command looks for Drupal's standard non search engine friendly URL format condition with the keyword "travel" also in the URL)
• "allinurl:q=node .edu" (if you're looking for some .edu comment links from universities and schools using Drupal, this search command can be useful) ;)
• "allinurl:drupal travel" (loosely related search command but could provide useful depending on industry niche)

If you want to use comment linking, which can be useful if managed properly, there are a bunch of other content management systems that do not utilize the rel=nofollow tag on outgoing links left by visitors that comment on stories. We have built an internal list of the ones that work well for linking using sites like CMS Matrix to find the content management systems that allow direct linking from comments. Unfortunately I cannot share our list - but I can share the overall idea!

If you'd like more information on our link building strategies , please contact us for more information. If you have your own ideas on finding relevant links using search commands, please leave a comment below on just how you do it. Since we use Drupal you will get a direct link from it ;-)

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