Link wheels, web 2.0 sites, Hubpages, Squidoo… all the big craze but what actually works? Some say to use web 2.0 properties as the search engines love them and they get spidered early and often. Others say why bother as you don’t actually own them and your web 2.0 property can get banned and deleted at any time.
When to use them.
Web 2.0 properties have two purposes. Ranking and links. First for ranking. If when you do a search for a long tail keyword and a web 2.0 property shows up in the search results, then that means that there is little to no competition for that keyword and it will be easy for you to also build a web 2.0 property and also get ranked for that keyword. Second for links. There are a lot of tools that allow you to research the backlinks of your competitors. If during this research, you find that your competitors have web 2.0 properties in their backlink profile, then you should too. These are some of the easiest links to go after and most can be gotten in a few hours of work… or less if you outsource it!
How to use them.
First step is to identify the top web 2.0 sites to build links from. The best ones are the ones that get indexed quickly by the search engines. Always remember that if a url is not indexed, then the links don’t count! After you identify which sites are the best, create accounts on them using your keyword as the subdomain. Upload 2-5 articles or blog posts of 100-500 words each. In each article or blog post include 2-5 links to your web properties. It is always better to link out to a variety of web properties versus sending 5 links all to the same domain for example.
So what are the best sites? Based on our 3 months of research we have found that the web 2.0 properties that are getting indexed the fastest are the following:
- Myblogsite.com 100%
- Blog.co.in 100%
- Ugetblog.com 100%
- WordPress.com 81%
- Blogster.com 80%
- Diarist.com 80%
- Soulcast.com 71%
- Weebly.com 70%
- Bloggels.info 70%
- Bloguni.com 70%
- Gather.com 70%
- Blogspot.com 70%
- Blog.com 61%
- Blogetry.com 60%
- Bravejournal.com 51%
- Spaces.live.com 50%
- Wetpaint.com 50%
- Weblog.com 50%
- Sosblog.com 40%
- Sites.google.com 38%
- Zoomshare.com 38%
- Vox.com 34%
- Tumbrl.com 30%
- Livejournal.com 30%
- Multiply.com 30%
- Typepad.com 20%
- Xanga.com 20%
- Thoughts.com 20%
- Quizilla.com 20%
- Ning.com 20%
- Webs.com 10%
As you can see, the majority of the web 2.0 properties have a less than 70% success rate. So is the statement that the search engines automatically love the web 2.0 properties an accurate one? We think not! For web 2.0 properties to work successfully you will need to go the extra step and promote the RSS feeds and also build links to your web 2.0 properties.
Have another web 2.0 property you would like us to test? Tell us about it in the comments section!
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This is very useful information. Thanks for collating it.
I have been using some social and microblogging sites. Tumblr, for example is a very elegant tool. However it seems to get indexed very slowly. Posterous is much faster in that regard. I’ve also found that Onsugar is pretty quick.
You are welcome Matt! Will add those three sites to our list to check over the next few months.
wow! this is exactly what i was searching for!! I needed a list for creating link wheel projects and now i’ll use the 1st 10 of your list….but how come blogspot got only 60% when google owns dat?
You are welcome! It is always so frustrating to wonder if what you are doing is working or not!