Here is a few ways that you can get free links to your blog without resorting to black hat SEO. Some of them are a little underhand, but you have to remember that even if YOU are not using those methods–there are hundreds of people out there who are.
Link bait
If you do not know how to create link bait then you are going to need to Google it and learn. It is not going to get you hundreds of links, in fact you will be lucky to get one, but if you do it twice per week then you are bound to get a few free links every now and then.
Quality content
If your website is good and useful then you will get organic links. All you need to do is make sure that you content is of a high quality, or make sure that your blog is useful in some way.
Hack other people’s sites
You are no saint. Hack someone else’s site and add a link to yourself. The WordPress users quite often fail to change their username from the default name. Find the blogger on Facebook, friend them, and look through their hobbies, interests and friends for their partners name, their kids, names, favorite pets names, even their favorite instrument.
Find twenty blogs, make twenty friends and I guarantee you that you will find someone like Benjamin Couldwell who has his blog password as bassoon. The same instrument it says he plays on his Facebook profile. This technique involves a bit of luck, but once you figure out a password or two you can add a few links to your site into their old posts every now and then, and they will never know.
Ask people nicely
If you are unwilling to accept the harsh realities of life, and believe that human kindness will get you further than hacking, you should try asking nicely. This works better if your find some sort of common ground first. However, if you are going to take the high road – be warned that if you ask too many people, you may be marked as a spammer. Your email account will probably be frozen as a result.
Ask the spammers
You will kick yourself for not thinking of this, but you know all of those spam emails you get. Instead of emailing them viruses and changing their client list from innocent Americans to the email addresses of the staff at your local CIA headquarters (try it…the spam soon stops). Anyway, instead of doing that–you should ask the spammers to link to you.
So long as you are asking the other merchants, and not the scammers (you know, the “please check your account people”), you may actually get a link or two out of it. Even if you don’t, you still get the satisfaction of knowing you spammed a spammer.
Set up lots of social media profiles and link from them
Is this a black-hat method if you set up a profile for all the imaginary friends living in your house? If you do not do too many at once you should be okay. It works a little better if you add some stuff to each profile every now and again, to make them look a little more real.
Create an Amazon profile and link to yourself
If you already have an Amazon selling account then where is the harm in setting up a bio and linking it to your blog?
Add an article to an article site
The Google Panda update vowed to get rid of all the content farms–they haven’t! You can add your article to somewhere nice such as Ezine or Squidoo and link to yourself. You can actually make very strong links on Squidoo if you pass their high publication standard. They let you publish anything, but if it is really good then your page will rank highly.
Even if your page ranks number 217,000 it will be “search-indexed” and your one link (keep it to one) from your article will be a good one. They have lots (probably in the millions) of article on Squidoo. It is well worth trying to have two or three rank highly. Do not add an article to an untraceable content farm that is impossible to “whois”, because they are the worst kind of content farm (that Panda has done nothing to shift).
There are certain sexy internet warriors who are taking aggressive action to damage those sites, because they are sick of having their articles copied onto them!