Hard to get good links in Japan.

[ron_ron]

I have one site in Japanese that has a little over 100 inbound links and a site in English that has over 600. I must say it is much easier getting links from sites in the western world. I am sure this doesn't surprize anyone.

Fortunately, if good links are harder to get from Japanese sites, they are harder for the competition to get as well. I keep trying, as do my competitors.

I have found that a lot of Japanese sites go to these web ranking sites to get links. I have been avoiding that. For one thing I kind of suspect Google will one day look at those sites as link farms and FFA's although that doesn't seem to be the case now. I find that many Japanese sites that are ranking well have tons of links from web ranking sites. Having those stupid banners cluttering up my pages doesn't appeal to me either.

My Japanese site does have a few English pages and I could probably get links from the western world but I am reluctatnt to go after links from sites outside of Japan as it would be like going off category. The link text might throw things off with Google as well.

Any suggestions?

[bill]

You're not alone. Linking campaigns in Japan are not easy at all. However those ugly blinking banners don't seem to bother the local audience, so that might be an alternative still. Another good way to get links can be to write some articles for targeted mail maga (e-mail newsletters). Those things get archived and spidered all the time...not to mention the traffic spurt when the article is mailed out.

[ron_ron]

Hi Bill,

You mean there is a good side to those mail maga's after all? Personally I can't stand them. What exactly are you suggesting, that I write an article and then get it into someone elses mail maga so that I can have a link to my site within the archived and spidered page?

[bill]

You got it ron_ron. Since there aren't that many blogs in Japan yet the e-mail magazines are still a good source of traffic if you can get them to link to you. If your product or service is cool/unique enough you might get a whole bunch of these newsletters virally linking to you. That's a best case scenario though. If you could semi-regularly contribute authoritative info on your topic to some of these newsletters then you'll get a lot of the non-SE traffic, and bunch more links. Alternately you could just buy ads in these newsletters, but I have no idea of conversion rates.

[ron_ron]

Thanks Bill, I'll give it a try. I am about 2 hours away from Osaka in Hyogo ken. Next time I am in town let's have a Starbuck's together.
Ron