The ultimate SEO link building strategy from Blog Action Day

It was Blog Action Day '09 yesterday and to take part bloggers are asked to write a post about, in this case Climate Change, including the words "Blog Action Day" and a link somewhere to www.blogactionday.org.

However as an internet marketing blog I’m writing a post about how change.org (the company behind Blog Action Day) has created the ultimate link building SEO technique.

Backlinks from authority sites

In one single day they are getting 12,023 (as of 08:30 16/10/2009) backlinks from a variety of blogs. And not just any blogs, they include Number10, Google Blog, Mashable - "12 of the world's Top 100 Blogs" according to their website.

In terms of the power of those links, they are hitting both quantity and quality.


Links in context

Blog Action Day are specifying that you write a post on climate change. So most of those links will be from sites talking about different aspects of climate change.

The context of the copy around a link is an important factor in search engine ranking of keywords so this will help blogactionday.org appear higher for "climate change". In fact at the moment they are at the 6th result on page 2 of Google - which is good for what I imagine is a hugely competitive keyword (and they were the 10th result on page 2 yesterday so moving up).


What have they missed?

Link anchor text

They could have done even better with this SEO technique by specifying the link anchor text. Anchor text is used by search engines to define the content of your site - you only have to do the old "click here" trick to find Adobe Reader listed at the top of Google (because most people link to Adobe with "If you need a PDF reader, click here").

They could have even provided a selection of options. For example:

Please help Blog Action Day conquer Google for all the most important Climate Change keywords. Please make your link to this site consist of the words "Climate change" "Carbon Footprint", "Environment" or "Sustainability".

Unique URLs

The URL blogactionday.com will move on next year and push a different subject, in the past it's looked at the Environment and Poverty.

So all this association of subject, anchor text and context mentioned above will vary each year. This means that blogactionday.com will start to list in the search engines for "poverty", "climate change" etc. The unique pages on blogactionday.com devoted to that year's subject will be deleted or updated with the next year's topic.

If instead each year they were to create a unique sub-domain, i.e. climatechange.blogactionday.org, and then push links to this, they would have a site devoted to climate change that would continue to exist even when blog action day had moved on.

It would also have keywords in the URL - another important SEO factor. Both the uniqueness of the URL and the specific focus of each sub-domain would help to propel the site to number one in Google for ALL keywords as opposed to doing reasonably well for most but not amazingly for any and to start to lose all that power the year after when they change their website.

I do realise however that Blog action day isn't just about their website though, but the discussion (or dare I say 'wave') ALL OVER the blogosphere, and for that it's an awesome idea.

If you would like to read similar posts actually about Climate Change, as opposed to a ramble about their internet marketing strategy, from some of my colleagues at UBM, please click on any of the links below:
Brian Sims, John Welsh, Ron Alalouff, Phil Clark, Grahame Morrison, Rob Enslin

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