New Idea to get incoming links

Linking strategy to get your fiercest competitor to link to you.

[jplander]

Sorry if this has been covered, but it has been over a year and a half since I've been on this forum with any regularity. I even had to create a new account.

I've come up with an idea get competitor websites to want to link to my site, and I need a little help fleshing out the details.

I promote an online business opportunity (OK, now I know you are all looking down on me, but my idea is still good) with a large distributor base and getting good listings in Google is extremely hard. They seem to be reserved by the long established heavy hitters. All I seem to get are the fringe keywords, which brings only moderate traffic at best.

So, here is my idea. I am developing a very high-energy flash intro movie that I'm going to allow anyone in my business to link to and use from my site. Under the movie, there will be a copyright notice and a link to my site that says something like "Get this [company name] movie for your site."

I'll provide the source code to be used, but only if they make no changes to it. As long as the movie is good, I think that this movie will spread virally, and my site should get several thousand extremely targeted incoming links within the year.

What do you think? Will it work? Any ideas to make it better?

[nicebloke]

You might want to try and get them to use more specific link text.

[jplander]

Yes, I thought of this, but the problem is how to place the link without offending anyone so they won't remove it.

What about using a graphical link and placing the company name in the alt text?

[martinibuster]

Giving away content with the agreement that your byline and link remains is a great way to build relevant links. Your way looks like a wholesale way of doing it. I'm doing it on a smaller scale.

I'm giving away an original article (it doesn't appear on any other site) and receiving a great link from a large Canadian website.

I followed a similar strategy by giving a major multinational permission to use one of my articles in their newsletter (they solicited us!).

[BlueSky]

I've seen this done quite a bit, and it seems to work pretty well. I'll be doing something similar when I launch my new site in the near future. Since you're doing a flash movie, I recommend you read up on the Eolas vs Microsoft case and the mod MS wants to do to its browser if you haven't done so already. Basically, they want to display an alert box every time a visitor accesses any page with active content coded using <applet>, <embed>, or <object> tags inlined in an HTML file. A visitor must press an okay button for each active content item afterwhich the page will behave normally. You might want to read up on the workaround and keep a tab on the case because things could be refined, changed, or even reversed.

[sudden]

Just a small add-on: You might want to change the anchor text of the link every month or so. Like this, you wont end up with a lot of links which have 100% identical anchor text. Even though I think itīs not sure that it would hurt your rankings, thereīs one thing less to worry about.

[elklabone]

>>to link to and use from my site.

Wouldn't they need to upload the flash movie to their server in order for there to be a benefit?

If they just link to your flash movie, that would boost the PR of your flash movie, but don't you need them to place the flash movie into their site...

BTW, this is a great idea.