Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz really knows his stuff and he’s taken some time to highlight what he believes are four of the best new linkbuilding services around. In no particular order they are Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, Eightfold Logic and WhiteSpark.
There has been an influx of new services over the last few months that offer SEOs something beyond the traditional linkbuilding strategy of reverse engineering backlink profiles. Some are more service oriented while some acquire links and still others focus on visibility challenges.
Zemanta:
A unique concept, Zemanta allows users to submit content in the form of data or images and then displays the data in front of other bloggers while they write. The idea is that bloggers will be affected by the message and mention the brand in their posts, increasing brand awareness. Another thought is that direct links can be obtained as bloggers link to the content provided and still another theory is that the bloggers themselves make up a pool of direct traffickers who actually click on the links themselves.
Google’s given Zemanta the White Hat seal of approval and is now approved to appear in both WordPress and Blogger platforms. SEOmoz reported good results after using the still-being-upgraded service for the last year.
MyBlogGuest:
Ann Smarty, founder of MyBlogGuest started the service in an attempt to match up those looking to write or receive a guest blog post. It’s a simple concept but if it catches on even with a select number of powerful blogs, the number of backlinks could be tremendous.
Ann’s thought is that deep connections will emerge between users of the service and she’s so far created a simple and elegant interface. It’s hard not to be compelled, but the action items on the site are not as pared down as they could be. With a little more branding and marketing, MyBlogGuest could really take off.
EightFoldLogic:
The site’s Linker function aims to create one on one, private connections. Similar to MyBlogGuest, Linker is directed towards a broader audience and connect sites with the idea of partnership in mind. Linker’s role ends once the parties are connected, though, which leads the mind to wonder exactly how up and up the link connections are on the back end. Linkbuilding connection marketplaces are an interesting idea but like best seo hosting sites will hold little water until the sites obtain enough users to make the service valuable. On that note, Linker’s free for the first couple of months.
WhiteSpark:
WhiteSpark’s Local Citation Finder’s goal is to help identify sites that Google uses as “sources” for local map data or conversely reference several sites that rank in SERP results. As local continues to become more and more of a major player the competition for a service that provides useful data around the mysterious field will become fierce. In the future, it would be interesting to see more data about the listings provided and also some services that help SEOs manage multiple listings with a multiple host.
Thanks to Rand and Heather Hendrick for summarizing him here.