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How To Build Up To 550 High Quality Links

This link building technique has been on the block for some time; mainly used by modern web designers and developers to promote themselves and their work. The designers who have some knowledge of SEO have been using the technique to increase the rankings of their clients' sites. My use of the method has shown it to be very effective at targeting not particularly competitive niches without any other link building. I'm talking of the kind of SERP when all your competitors are no more than PR3. This is particularly true if you have your keyword(s) in your company name. There are probably some niches that you could take outright with the technique alone, as many of the sites dispensing the links are high in PageRank – up to PR8 and most being 4+.

Design Bombs CSS Gallery

So, enough with the waffle. The method is submitting your sites to web design galleries – with most of them being known as CSS galleries. Not just any old site will get onto these galleries though. If your designer is not able to do anything beyond lines and boxes this is probably not going to work for you as its all about modern web design. Sites that use custom graphics and iconography tend to do the best. You also won't be able to get away with sloping the design into tables, CSS is a prerequisite and many galleries will not accept your site if it doesn't validate against it's DTD. To give you an idea of the sort of sites that will do well here are a few recent sites doing the rounds: Postbox, Mail Chimp and Tutorial 9.

This is a really good way to build links if you are building a new site with the intention of SEOing it. Rather than sending your design out to India to be rolled off the template sausage machine, you could take your site a little more serious and hire a small company of modern web professionals or a hard-working freelancer. Having such a site built is going to cost you more for the quality, but at the end of the day you will gain a lot of natural inbound links that most of your competitors probably won't be able to get. Take this site for example (SEM Labs); it has links from 157 unique CSS galleries. Alone they are probably worth a PR4. If I wanted to be the anti-Cutts and buy the same amount of links from the splog factory, I'd be looking at a spending around $2,000+. When you could get a similar design and HTML job for about the same price by a talented freelancer. So by taking your design and HTML a bit more seriously you can also set down a solid cornerstone for your SEO.

I've been using this for a while. In fact it was my first real good SEO trick :) Over the years I have amalgamated probably the most complete list of CSS galleries in my control centre. You can find the list below with a few logo galleries thrown in too. If you're going to submit to these sites, make sure you don't use the same spam titles you use for directory submissions. This is not the gutter and should be treated as such.

Incidentally, if you are looking for a good freelancer these sites are the best place to look for them. You could always use someone from Eastern Europe if you're low on Illuminati paper.

If you know any more please drop them in the comments. There are actually a lot more Chinese and Japanese ones as well as Flash galleries.

Comments

Miko K. Replied at 5:21 PM on 19 Mar 2009
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ROLF

"This is not the gutter and should be treated as such."

and

"if you're low on Illuminati paper"

Excellent info and very funny too :)

Pixel Kingdom Replied at 1:43 AM on 20 Mar 2009
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hehe, lovely link building strategy! Any, this site has been bookmarked!

joyoge designers' bookmark Replied at 9:00 AM on 20 Mar 2009
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very nice useful resources, thanks for the ultimate list..

Dainis Graveris Replied at 12:21 PM on 20 Mar 2009
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This is sick list! Amazing trick, I am bookmarking this article.

David King Replied at 2:12 PM on 20 Mar 2009
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I find that commenting on every article I read is really good for my rank too... Is this ironic right now?

David Replied at 2:19 PM on 20 Mar 2009
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Not when your link gets nofollowed like this one.

David King Replied at 2:32 PM on 20 Mar 2009
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Well, that's probably egg all over my face - but one can't be 100% sure what happens on SE spidering and ranking systems:

http://bit.ly/1ZGtSg

In my mind nofollow is interpreted as "this link shouldn't reflect on my site" - of course that's total speculation - maybe there's a test that could be conducted?

David Replied at 3:03 PM on 20 Mar 2009
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Personally, I think that if a comment adds to the quality of an article like this one that it deserves to be followed. Blogs and blog-like-things (like this) are not all about the author. The commentors can become a vital part of the quality of a site. However, I think any comment that comes in with keywords in the name (like "web design lancaster") should get nofollowed by default or maybe just binned.

Anyway. Regarding your thoughts on nofollow. I think its right what you've said. I've seen an article that said that they had a nofollow link that was helping their site rank for a misspelling.

If you wanted you could conduct a test. You could post a link to a site somewhere that uses nofollow using a name that doesn't appear anywhere on the internet. Something like: thewaffleatimustfall. It would be best to post a few comments using that name for good measure. Then do a search for that site on a search engine for the weird made up word you have used as you comment name. If the site comes up it means the search engine has counted the link.

David Replied at 4:01 PM on 20 Mar 2009

B'oh. We've reached the nested comment limit.

You'll probably find that someone has already done this. Try a bit of Googeling.

David King Replied at 3:39 PM on 20 Mar 2009

Yeah, as part of my upcoming project (I'm setting up shop with my brother) we're gonna be doing lots of experiments and research with SEO and I think that doing the one you mentioned is a brilliant idea!

Gen Replied at 7:23 AM on 22 Mar 2009
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yes its a real good strategy for web designers to get good links for their site and maintaining a brand

Kimberly Bock Replied at 12:49 AM on 24 Mar 2009
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Not trying to wreak havok or anything, but I think I reeeeally like you and your post, if not for any other reason than Sphinn had such a problem with it. lol..Sphinn is a freak glam show of slaves and drama queens with no regard for humanity. H*ll, for that, I'm even grabbing your feed. :-)

ehy Replied at 8:47 PM on 26 Mar 2009
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yes this is a very cool trick your site will have to look clean though.

Jonclaude Replied at 6:01 AM on 10 Apr 2009
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I was always fear about links because I don't know how things working thank for your post to point out some tips and tricks...

Howard Replied at 1:13 PM on 11 Apr 2009
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Great list, Great write-up. Will definitely use these tips on a few of our sites to see how it will work. Thank you

Klaye Replied at 4:46 AM on 16 Apr 2009
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Don't forget The CSS Gallery List! :)

Kikolani Replied at 5:58 PM on 16 Apr 2009
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Interesting way to get link backs. That is one comprehensive list of galleries that I will save for future design inspiration reference. Thanks for sharing your tips!

~ Kristi

Charlie Replied at 5:35 PM on 12 May 2009
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cool and new one ;)

http://www.cssamigo.com

Jermaine Replied at 8:12 PM on 21 Jun 2009
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Thanks for the CSS gallery list! These are some great resources you have provided us on here. Link building takes time, but you've just made it a little bit easier with the galleries provided, thanks.

Jay Replied at 9:20 PM on 2 Aug 2009
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thanks for this wonderful list. I will compile this list and start using them for advertising my css designs. Full Gold, 100 thanks!

FH Replied at 7:18 AM on 22 Sep 2009
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This is a very nice compilation, possibly the best on the web. But about one out of four links is broken.

Dzinemart Replied at 1:06 AM on 15 Dec 2009
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Hi, WOW Great List ! I m suggesting another CSS Design Gallery

www.dzinemart.com

Kati Replied at 12:27 PM on 13 Nov 2010
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Thank you for this theme. iI like this.

josh Replied at 7:06 AM on 17 Jan 2011
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I have already used this method for generating backlinks for few of our website as css gallery can not only generate backlinks but also help us to increase traffic.

The list provided here is really awesome and will definitely use the same. Thanks for sharing

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Entry Info

Mar
19
2009
Author: David
Comments: 24
Posted Under: Graphics, CSS, SEO, Link Building

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