Followed Links from Four Unexpected Sources

We receive many questions every day in our Q & A section. Every question is answered by a different mozzer and is handled personally. Often times we will run across a specific question being asked various times. Although the question is usually never exactly the same, the answer is often fairly similar. One question that has been popping up lately is whether it is really worth it, from an SEO standpoint to participate in Social Media.

The way I usually answer is that although most Social Media and networking sites nofollow their outbound links, they often send relevant traffic to your site. And as junseth mentioned in his YOUmoz post, one nofollowed link could very well gain you several followed links!

A couple of the questions have asked about links from specific sites, so some research was done while answering their questions. From this I found a few sites that I wouldn't have thought to pass link juice... but low and behold they do! Not only did I find that it's possible to get a followed link from these sites, but I dug a little deeper to show the actual MozRank passed by the link as well.

Panoramio

First, we had a member ask whether the site Panoramio could be useful for SEO. My husband is a photographer and he actually uses Panoramio on his blog. This is a cool site that let's you take photos and place them on a Google map and you can see places around the world. There is also a WordPress plugin that allows you to add this feature to your blog. My initial inclination was that no, there wasn't any specific use for Panoramio other than what I mentioned above... the idea that you could get followed links from other users who like your work. But then I realized that profiles on Panoramio have followed links!

Unfortunately you can't customize the anchor text, but you do get a nice followed link to your site from a PR 7 and DmR 6.78 site. Woot!

Zillow

The next site was actually found while looking for a good example of using charts and images for link bait while poking around Zillow.com. Again I noticed that there were followed links from the profile pages! This would be a really great link for any business associated with the Real Estate industry in any way.


At first I thought the biggest issue with these links was that the anchor text is predefined to "Website" and "Blog." But then I realized that Zillow also allows you to create your own followed links in the "About" section. Mmmhmmm YES THEY DO! Zillow.com also has a PR 7 and a DmR of 6.96. Although this site may not work for everyone, those who can use it could really benefit!

YouTube

Now, I've heard time and time again that sites like YouTube and Facebook don't pass link juice, but I am here to prove them wrong. This question initially came from a question by a member and it had a number of us digging around YouTube trying to figure out why certain links were followed but others weren't.

I started to notice that there were two distinct looks to the average YouTube channel (I'm talking about your average user, not the ones PAYING for fancy pages with followed links - that's not a paid link or anything!). My channel (which admittedly has nothing on it) had a nofollowed link to my personal blog. But a couple of my friend's sites, had a different look & feel and their links were followed!

My friend suggested that perhaps I should edit the link and see if anything changed. As soon as I logged in and went to edit my profile, I got a popup asking me if I'd like to use the new Beta. Hrmmm sure! And VOILA! As soon as I chose the Beta version, my link was now followed! Here's an example of a profile passing juice:


I still didn't really believe it though. So I poked around in the code trying to see if they had the beta versions noindexed or hidden via the robots.txt or something like that. Nope, I couldn't find anything. From here I started to dig around, I wanted to find a site that had received MozRank to their personal site FROM their YouTube channel. I mean heck, with an overall  PR 9 and DmR 9.06 who wouldn't want a nice juicy link from YouTube?

Hubba hubba! There it is... passing nice juice! Sure the anchor text isn't the greatest, but the actual PR on the page is a PR 6. Very nice.

Facebook

Now, you're wondering how to get a link from Facebook since I mentioned it above. Some of you may have already read about this over at HubSpot but you can create followed links on Facebook pages using HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Check out the Jack & Bobby Facebook page (a show on the WB) as an example.

Before you get too excited I want to make it clear that spamming these sites in any way is a terrible idea. My intention for showing these sites is to prove that if you look hard enough you can make the most out of many sites on the web, these are just 4 examples. The best way to go about building links through these various sites is simple... only make a profile if it makes sense! If having a profile on Zillow or Panoramio doesn't make sense, don't do it. If you have a spammy profile, no one will link to you and the page will never get indexed anyway. So please use this information for good... and not evil. :)

I'm sure there are tons of other sites out there that pass link juice but these four really jumped out at me in the past week. I should also mention that we have worked with Zillow and Facebook in the past but I didn't find this information through our work with them. All of these sites have excellent domain PageRank and MozRank and are probably sites you didn't imagine getting nice links from! I'd love to hear other examples (come on now folks... don't be stingy!) and find out if you have any additional info.

 

Jen: edited to fix incorrect use of "alt text" spelling errors and a missing link!