Using profiles to build backlinks and online authority is certainly a great combination. I’m constantly amazed how many people don’t take advantage of profiles. I’m sure your web site has a brand “name”. What happens when you type it into Google? Are all the results pages that you’re in control of? Or are a few results your sites and pages, some competitors, and others scraper sites that have hijacked your content? Maybe some of the results are web sites that are saying negative things about you.
Profile pages are good for backlinks, but you can dominate the first (and even second) page of google results for your keywords with profile pages that you control. Sometimes you can even mitigate bad reviews and do some online damage control or what they call “reputation management” to be proper.
Best Places to get Profiles
Where do you get profiles you ask? Well, the reason I wrote this post in the first place is because a new profile site just opened up, and everyone who’s anybody seems to be getting one – it’s called About.Me. Supposedly it’s supposed to be the end all be all of master profile pages.
Here’s what mine looks like right now (click to visit it):
I have my twitter profile, my facebook business profile, my wordpress RSS feed, LinkedIn, and 2 of my sites listed right now. The links are dofollow, and this onlyh took 5 minutes to setup. As About.Me grows I predict this page will be a great backlink overall.
So I would start there.
Where else should you get a profile page? Continue on with the obvious first:
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Foursqure
Flickr
Then I would move on to these:
tumblr
Posterous
LiveJournal
Reddit
Digg
Technorati
BlogCatalog
Stumbleupon
Diigo
Del.icio.us
Yelp
Blogger
Google
There are lots of other places you can get profiles, and any place you can leave your brand name and a link is good. But places that you can consistently use for backlinks that grow over time (like the items in the list above), those are the best backlinks of all. Use your profiles wisely to create your own little “link network” to support your web site and brand, and you’ll be thinking smarter – not harder!
Turns out I’d been doing the right thing here purely by accident, I’d setup various profiles over the years on places like LiveJournal, Myspace, Technorati etc and linked them back to my blog. The About.Me concept is interesting, kind of like an online business card. The only issue I can see is that for people with common names it might be hard to find them. Obviously that’s not an issue if you are just interested in backlinks.