UPDATE: It seems that Google profile is NO LONGER Dofollow. The links of old profiles seem to have been grandfathered as "dofollow ", but for new profiles, any link added to the profile is set to nofollow. This is what I and one of my subscribers found out recently!
Still, since it is Google, I would create a profile anyway. It would help spread my name across the web, and also bring me a little traffic. Moreover Google is very weird and unpredictable about counting nofollow links!
Digg has also become nofollow, both for old and new profiles. :( Thanks to Aaron (one of my blog readers) for letting me know! :)
I will keep the rest of this article intact for posterity! ;)
——
If you are reading this, you probably already know the power of ‘do follow’ backlinks. Truth to be told, you can get traffic both from ‘nofollow’ and ‘do follow’ links; in fact, sometimes nofollow links might give you more traffic, depending on the site your link is located at! But if you want to get good rankings for your site in SERPs, only a ‘dofollow’ backlink can help you! Let’s discover how to get ‘do follow’ backlinks from the two top dogs of World Wide Web!
Google: One of the little known facts is that you can get a ‘dofollow’ backlink directly from the creators of ‘pagerank’: yep, I mean the big G or Google™ as it is known to us. And it is so simple that I wonder why I didn’t figure it out sooner!
It all started when I saw a public Google profile of my friend Angela Edwards. Now whenever I see her put a couple of backlinks on any page or site I check closely to see if the links on that page are all dofollow. Since she is the backlink queen, I think she won’t be putting backlinks on a page without reason, but that’s just my guess. :D
What you need to do is pretty simple: just open a Google account and then setup a public profile by going to:
http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me/editprofile
If you use any of the Google’s services such as Analytics™, Adwords™, Adsense™, Google Sites, or Gmail™, then you already have a Google account and there is no need to signup again! Just go to the link above to setup your public profile.
Okay, when you setup your Google profile for the first time, you should get a message asking you if you want your full name to be displayed in Google’s search results. You should opt for it as it is one way people can locate you easily and quickly on the web.
If you don’t get this message, then just to your profile page. FYI, the URL to your public profile page would be in this format (the number at the end of the URL might differ from user to user):
http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/106055399441399261028
Once there, check the option "Display my full name so I can be found in search" as shown by the arrow in the following screenshot:
Okay, now the juiciest part you have been waiting eagerly for: that is, the "do follow’ part. A little lower down on your profile page, you will find a section where you can add as many custom links as you want to your profile page. I would put my "anchor text" in the "Link name" box. All of your links would be visible on the right hand side of your Google profile.
All the links you add here are DoFollow! If you are a Firefox user, you can verify this by using the SearchStatus plugin of Firefox. A ‘no follow’ link is highlighted in red, unlike a ‘do follow’ link! I visited my profile page using Firefox browser and as you can see from the screenshot below, the links on the left are NOT highlighted and hence are DoFollow:
Digg: Another giant site you can get a DoFollow link from is Digg.com. We are all familiar with this site; in fact, if you have even a little knowledge about social media, you are sure to know of Digg.com. Again I should give credit for this ‘discovery’ to one of Angela’s Backlink packets.
Once you signup for Digg, login and click on ‘My Profile’ link at the top. Then click on the ‘Add a Bio & Links’ link on the right, as pointed by this arrow:
A little lower down on that page, you will find a section called ‘ Links and Contact Info’. In the description box, you can type your "anchor text" and put your link in the next box. You are allowed to add as many links as you want!
Make sure that you go to your Profile settings and set your links to be accessible by public. In the ‘Display URLs I add to my profile to’ section, choose the option ‘Anyone’ as shown below:
Once you do that, your links should be visible on your profile page (the URL to your profile page would be http://digg.com/users/username, where "username" is your Digg username).
I visited my profile page using Firefox browser and once again you can see from the screenshot below that they are NOT highlighted in red. Therefore, they are all ‘do follow’ links:
This is just the tip of the iceberg! You can get 30 such high-PR backlinks every month from Angela’s Backlink packets, all for a measly $5.00! And just so you know, she neither begged nor paid me to recommend her! ;)
Very useful info. I had already done the Google profile but never got around to Digg until I read this post. I also signed up for Angela’s link building packet. Thanks for the heads up about her!
Ok good hints on backlinks. I just tried the google one first (havn’t gotten to the digg one yet). Only thing is that when I create my profile page and load it up with anchored text and backlinks, i noticed that there is not a PR for profile pages, even though most of google’s pages are between 6 & 10. so, by doing this profile thing that you suggest is that equivalent to just getting a PR-0 backlink? thanks.
Do you submit articles to Ezinearticles.com? If so, does the article get a PR value as soon as it is published? But your EzineArticles article counts as much as your other link building efforts towards boosting your site’s PR (if you are linking to your site as the article landing page, that is)! Same could be said of forum signatures too; people do it for SEO reasons even though the threads they post on may or may not always have a PR value!
When it comes to SEO, the PR of the page you are putting your links on doesn’t matter! What matters is the DOMAIN’s PR and more importantly, the age and authority of the domain!
Arindam
This is great information. These tips are wonderful. I didn’t know how to do this. Thanks so much on how to get a google and digg link.
Lynda
Thanx a lot Arindam. While I have added the url to my blog on Digg I wasn’t aware about the Google profile page. Wud definitely add the blog’s url to it.
R backlinks from Google hot trends do follow?
I am afraid I don’t have an answer to your question. :( But I have a friend who might be able to answer this question. I would direct her to this comment and hopefully she would drop in to post a reply ;)
Arindam
P.S. Your link is not working. If you made a typo, let me know and I would be happy to correct it :)
Very good info AC.I still doubt if you are not associated with Angela because you seemed to be very favorable to her and her linkbuilding packets.(I may be wrong) but who cares..info is good and it is helpful.
Hi,
Angela is my friend yes (no partner, lol), but that is not the reason why I recommend her stuff.
If that would have been the case then I would have recommended stuff of my other friends too, good or bad. I recommend Angela’s stuff because it WORKED for me!
A good way is neither to believe Angela nor me, but to join the 1 month free trial to the backlink building membership. It would cost you nada, and would give you a good idea of whether her packets are really worth your time and money :D
Thanks for the such a wonderful tips for getting the back links its really helpful to increasing the PR.
Hi Arindam
I came across this blog from the email you sent me and wow you gave me so many tips.
I have been using Digg a lot more recently and have built a huge following and you know what its like. I never created a full profile and set it up properly like you mention here
Many thanks
Hamant
Thanks for sharing these valuable post buddy,i try this and got my backlinks :)
Two years later and this is still very much relevant and a great resource!
Great information in this post. Thank you and keep up the great work.
are you sure digg does not give backlinks i have listed many of my links in digg hoping i would get backlinks and thus increase my linkpopularity in google search engine .. please give me more info about how to get back links… thanks
aishwarya … You ask for more info how to get back links, why don’t you just read Arindam’s posts right here on this blog, your will get more info than you will be able to use!
and PS, I am not affiliated to Arindam in any way, but I am a use fan as this blog provides tons of good and free info!
Thanks Manie. :D And you are right: she only has to read my longest article to get all the info she needs! :P
http://flexiblewriter.com/market-website
Now if she finds it intimidating that is her problem! ;)
Or the 6 part post about getting back links, it is all there, more than in many paid products!
Thank you. I been a member of Digg for months, it didn’t come to my mind that I can get a backlink from them out of my profile