The Backlink Service I Stopped Building

Way back at the end of 2008, I launched a community-driven backlink service. I charged a small monthly/annual fee for the service and kept it going until it wasn’t possible to do so given my Internet connectivity problems at the time. Prior to giving (yes, it was given, not sold) the service to someone else, I gave partial refunds to annual subscribers and even some full refunds for monthly subscribers. As the result of a prodding by an online friend, I started programming a replacement service in the middle of last year. I’m not working on it anymore and I have good reasons for stopping that project.

The Panda and Penguin Updates by Google

I was hesitant to start working on a backlink service again to begin with because Google would probably find the service, even if it’s private, and apply penalties to any website using the service. My experience with the previous service tells me that there are plenty of people who simply will not follow instructions and will leave obvious footprints for Google to track back to the source. They were linking from and to irrelevant or loosely related content. The Panda filters would have caught them.

The Penguin update goes after “money keywords” being used too often as anchor links to niche websites along with other things. A backlink service would foster the same money keywords and would make any site using it a Penguin target. Frankly, given the actions by Google over the past year and a half, I’m inclined to ignore any ideas that can be viewed as link building schemes.

Better Ideas

I have a few different web services in mind, but I refuse to work on them until I get my SSL certificate issue rectified since I’m building everything on subdomains of this doman name. Protecting user logins is of paramount importance.

I’m not being overly confident in that I know how to use PHP as external JavaScript code and that’s how my ideas would work. I loathe using plugins for settings when the settings can be accomplished at the web service itself. The only issue is that of caching responses at the target websites and I think I have a way to do that as well, but I’ll have to do quite a bit of testing.

In other words, this won’t happen overnight.

The Strongest Linking Juice

Arbitrary backlinks, regardless of how relevant they are, are no longer viable backlinks because they’re so low in value. Guest posting in relevant niches seems to be the best way to go about it these days. Niche site to niche site backlinks are hard to obtain and therefore appear to carry the most weight.

This is not to say that other “in-content” links don’t carry any weight because I think they do, just not as much as if from related niche websites. What I’m trying to say is that guest posting still works and building a service to facilitate it will probably be a good idea.