Well, link building is now a hot topic for me. Why? The reason is quite simple. During the latest Google’s PR downgrade all my sites lost their PRs. The biggest loss was endured by cbtrends.com sinœ its PR went from 4 to big zero in a matter of two weeks. Of course with the loss of PR came rapid reduction in traffic sent to the site by Google and other search engines.

What is most upsetting is that I do not really understand why cbtrends.com got penalized. I have other sites that are of much lower quality compared with cbtrends.com and they retained some of their PRs. For example proventowork.com, which is a simple directory of ClickBank products retained PR1 out of original PR3. Oh well, enough crying. Now I need to look into link building and make sure that the links appear as if they are natural, not paid or solicited ones.

While doing the research about link building I stumbled upon a number of very interesting approaches.

1. Find old and not frequently updated blogs that have PR on their pages and post comments. I managed to find a couple with PR 3 to 6 and posted comments with the links to my sites. This approach proved to be very time consuming and I do not want to continue doing it.
2. Since veoh.com allows live links in the comments, I created an account and I posted comments that included links to my sites. This is an easy and fun work - watch movies and create links while having fun. Posting on veoh.com has another benefit - traffic. I do not post too many comments (I posted around 15 comments in total so far) but still my sites are getting on average 20 visitors from veoh, which is not bad at all.
3. Create the “about” pages on wikectory.com and aboutus.org. This is a very simple job to be done and the pages created got spidered by Google the next day, thus giving me free strong content links.
4. The final approach that I discovered but not used yet is to use sites like sponsoredreviews.com. Sponsoredreviews allows you to find bloggers that would, for a fee, write a review/article about your site/pages and post it on their blogs. This is a great approach but very expensive. The minimum cost of a single review is 5$ and it is extremely difficult to find bloggers willing to do the job for this amount. It is very common to see reviews being offered for 20 to 500$ (the price depends on the quality of the review and the PR/size of the blog readership).

I also managed to find a couple of high PR pages on digg.com and other social networking sites. I hope that I would manage to regain some of the lost PR if I would continue creating links to my sites/pages on a daily bases.