The Ontolo Link Building Toolset + Google Custom Search = Link Building Fun

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Ontolo launched what is quite possibly the greatest invention in the history of mankind recently.  After producing a plethora of fabulous tools that made link prospecting and qualification easier the past few years, they finally put everything together in one fabulous package with the Ontolo Link Building Toolset.  If you want to see it in action, I would recommend you check out the user guide – the videos at the bottom of the page made me an immediate believer.

If you’re too lazy to click and watch, the tool basically allows you to input keywords for research and relevance (plus the ability to weight their importance), competitors to monitor, as well as the type of linking opportunities you prefer (also with weighting).  It takes all of this information, and it builds you a database of prospects based on your defined parameters AND you can continually refine them as you grow your database.  Oh, and after it builds your database you can search out specific link opportunity types and set parameters by PageRank of URL/domain/subdomain and put in search queries for title and text searches – which you can then easily export to an Excel sheet.  Did you get all that?

If you’ve ever spent any amount of time building links, you may want to re-read the above paragraph.  The tool really does all of the above.

I’m still wrapping my head around everything this beast can actually do, but between that and trying to figure out some more uses for Google Custom Search I think I may have found a way to make this tool even more powerful.  The database search tools are pretty powerful within the ever expanding database Ontolo provides, but I REALLY like my full suite of Google search operators, so I performed a little experiment, which you can use at the bottom of this post.

A current database I’m working with has some information relating to swimming, so I accessed the blog comments tool within Ontolo and specified my parameters:

  1. I set my search parameters for URLs with page text containing swim* (with the wild card to allow for pages with “swimmers”, “swimming”, etc.)
  2. I set my subdomain minimum PageRank to 3 (as opposed to the domain, which wouldn’t filter out subdomains on Blogspot, WordPress, etc.)
  3. I ran my search and got 157 results – which I then copied into an Excel document
  4. I ran a find and replace on all of the subdomains in my database so they all appeared as www.subdomain.tld/* which would tell Google to search the entirety of these subdomains
  5. So the general idea here is to use Google’s database to find blog commenting opportunities on all of these subdomains ON TOP of the URLs already given to me by Ontolo…Oh, and I’ve already prequalified all of these subdomains to be at least a PR3, assuming I’ll end up on some established blogs.  Oh yeah, this could be good.

So, if you’re looking to get a little link juice with your comment, you might want to seek out pages with “keywordluv” in the text, as these blogs typically are dofollow AND allow anchor text.  So now you can run a quick search like “keywordluv” +”swimming” to find posts that are both keywordluv and have the term swimming within them.  Here are some good prospects to start contributing to these conversations while you get some valuable links (I shouldn’t have to say that you SHOULD NOT spam these sites).

You can also look for other topics like inurl:olympic swim if you want to contribute to conversations that are focused on the Olympics and swimming.  There are literally an almost infinite number of combinations you can try, and I’ve actually inserted the Google Custom Search Engine I developed off of my little database below.  Now keep in mind, this is only using 157 domains out of the 5,000 you can possibly use with Google CSE, so this is literally only the tip of the iceberg for what can be done with this.  Give it a try using my mini database here:

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Some additional resources that you should…no, have to read if you thought this post was interesting:

Adam Henige

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and Moz.

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