Something caught my attention today that I thought some of our babblers might find interesting.

I don't know if you have heard of the Grammar Girl, but she is a writer of grammatical tips and a popular author on Amazon. Anyway, she developed this idea for building links to her site. It is a contest. I'll just quote the email I got from her (it ties into her website page about her newest book):

She does a search on Twitter each day to find a winner.

There are many ways a person could do something similar. I guess a person needs to be careful not to be seen as buying links, but this does look like something with a lot of potential.

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Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

It sounds like an OK idea for selling the product but the backlinks would be so diverse that it would go against what is considered to be good SEO practices.

Twitter links are NOFOLLOW, there's no link juice value there anyway.

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I have always wondered about link traffic from Twitter. I guess for her, if she gets traffic from Twitter then I guess her promotion is a success. It may not affect her ranking in the SERP as much though, unless people actually start linking to her from their sites.

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Points well taken.

The primary thought I got was the essential concept. In this case it is to offer something of value to those you want a link from without crossing the line into paid links. The lure of a contest is what she used here. I think there could be a lot of other possibilities.

It is always best to apply something like this in your own unique way. Do follow links from relevant sources would certainly be an important goal, as suggested.

Thanks for the comments, Jordy3738 and TechieGuy. Very helpful. My focus has been primarily on coding and content to date but I am looking forward to learning more about some of these other areas soon.

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Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

It's a nice idea, but I'd be careful about how you use it. I know these examples aren't exactly fresh (I don't follow SEO developments that closely), but David Airey (more) and John Chow were both penalised (at least in part) for linkbombing after running contests.

Of course the Twitter (or some other) version of this may be fine, but I'd spend a bit of time searching for others' experience first.

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Some great points raised in this thread. I was also going to mention that Twitter uses 'no follow' links but Jordy beat me to it

I find this plugin very useful for quickly checking what sites use no follow links.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

You would be surprised how many directories I have seen using 'no follow' links, but yet people still submit their sites (not that I’m a big fan of directory submission).

I would also like to share this plugin with everyone. The person who created this plugin got over 20,000 unique visits to his site during the contest.

http://www.contestburner.com/

This plugin is for Wordpress and allows you to run an automatic contest on your blog. Visitors earn points in the contest for every click the link gets. Not only that people are also awarded points for every comment they make on your blog (you have to approve the comment).

You can also upgrade the plugin for about $50, this gives added features. This includes comments on your Youtube videos and points when someone joins your newsletter.

I would love to see someone on this forum with a heavy traffic site run a contest using the plugin because it really is powerful.

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It seems good idea for selling some products but in the way of link building it would not be better than that.

at least john chow still a free backlink from controversy that he had made "like what he said it's all about pushing the limits", who will know the limits if someone haven't actually gone over the limits..

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