Working the Wiki’s for Backlinks

Have you ever wanted to write your own web site reviews and completely control not only the copy but the links and keywords as well? Believe it or not - there are a few sites where you can do just that, and there’s nothing like a one-way-link where you have full editorial control!

I wrote a post last month about Turning Spam and Splog into Backlinks and Gold that talked about looking your site up in google and working some of those “directory” sites that are taking over your SERP’s to your benefit. I read this article today on Mixed Market Arts Two Easy Free Links for All Your Sites and it reminded me of my post, but had one site I hadn’t heard about before - so let’s revisit this subject!

There are directory sites on the web with basically no intrinsic value at all - and they are pretty much automated scraper sites. The crawler probably goes through whois records, and sets up a wiki page for every site it finds, and it populates a page with your blog title and some kind of description. It barely has enough unique content to get a listing in google. The information is so targeted that when you do a search for www.yoursite.com in google - these pages rank in the first page of the search results! I’m sure they also rank for a variety of keywords related to your site too.

You aren’t going to get them to take down your blog listing page, you were given lemons, and I’ll show you how to make lemonade from this situation! There are two sites you can completely control your own wiki page from for your domain:

AboutUs.org
Wikectory.com

All you have to do is search for your domain page by looking for either aboutus.org/yoursite.com or wikectory.com/wiki/yoursite.com. I found mine at AboutUs.org/jtpratt.com and Wikectory.com/wiki/jtpratt.com. If yours doesn’t exist already - just create it! You can create a wiki page for every single domain you own! Take advantage of the fact that you have full editorial control and add some very descriptive and keyword laden text. Add as many paragraphs of text as you like. Link to your related sites and link to and highlight your featured posts and pages! Be sure to quote and bold important keywords. Write a beautiful quality review page for your web site or blog and treat this page like any other online profile page. My suggestion would be to also update these pages every few months to keep them fresh in the search engines.

If you have any problems learning how to write using the wiki format - just view this wiki cheat sheet to get the gist of it! Now that you’ve seen what others have done with a wiki (and used it to your benefit), maybe you could think of how setting up a wiki in your own web site could benefit you? Most Wiki software is free and open source (like Wordpress), and all you have to do is download the scripts and set it up. If you want some suggestions for what Wiki to try read Which Open Source Wiki is Best for You? There are also some hosted options, you can check out this Comparison of Wiki Software.

I encourage you to take full advantage of the wiki domain pages at the 2 sites I listed earlier in this article, and also to do so for every web site and blog you own. Do you know of other Wiki sites that offer (or automatically setup) web site pages? If so, or if you have a question - comment now!