Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Here's my next bad idea to get a (admittedly smaller) gov't link. I'm going to approach the folks running the site for our local/regional goverment body. And I'm going to see if I can sell them on the idea of a business directory with free listings.
Having a listing of real businesses locally on their site first promotes the local businesses. Good idea for the regional government. Secondly, it shows the business vitality and diversity of businesses in the region, which can be used to entice other businesses to find the area an attractive location.
We'll see how convincing I am :).
Having a listing of real businesses locally on their site first promotes the local businesses.
Therein lies the problem. They cannot appear to be "promoting" the local businesses.
Only criteria is that you're, well, local.
Plus the regional government body I'm talking about is on a local .com type address. It's a regional government - not much above the government of a small town.
I agree I wouldn't bother sending this type of email to someone on a .gov domain. But in this case, think smaller. The elected reps for this level of government here, well the one guy runs the local car licensing office so I know him, the other guy is a retired teacher I know from my volunteering at the school, that type of thing :). They represent probably in total, maybe 10,000 local residents (most of whom seem to share the same last name, but I digress :) ).
Now, that's not a .gov link. But their website? A golden PR 5. Because all their backlinks are .gov/dmoz/.edu type links. IMO that's pretty much as good - and may be way easier to get; we'll see.
In any event, the idea is to start at the most local/small form of government you can find and work up.
DIY Government links
Heh! I saw the title and immediately thought .gov TLD. Forgive me. :)
Hi,I run a {widgets} in downtown {local}. As a local business, I would like to suggest that the {region} consider listing local businesses in kind of a directory style on the {domain .com} website.
From the {region's} perspective, I think a robust business directory, with both a breadth and depth of business listings helps make the locale look robust and attractive to other businesses. A business person looking at a directory with a wide variety of interesting businesses is going to see the region here as a good place to do business.
Such a directory would also be useful for local consumers, helping us/them shop locally and find local services. I think in the next year or two, getting our residents to shop locally is going to become very important for local businesses. And of course, it's an easy way for the {region} to help local businesses without actually doing much - just making our names available to visitors is a good thing for local businesses.
The {chamber of commerce} already does this; but of course not all businesses in {region} are members of the {chamber of commerce}. A business directory on the {region's} site wouldn't need any requirements or costs to the businesses other than being located in the township.
From a technical perspective, you can get a software program to run a directory like this easily - $75 or so is all it takes for a program like {name of program} (there's many of these programs available).
Thanks for your consideration, feel welcome to contact me if you have any questions or would like me to comment further.
Regards,
{my name, and my physical address}
Many municipal agencies are on the dot US TLD and yes they're handing out links to qualifying websites same as universities do on the dot EDU TLD.
>Many municipal agencies are on the dot US TLD
Actually, I've seen a number of local governmental agencies creeping into the .gov tld. Counties, mostly, but I've seen a few others ...so gov is marginally polluted, PG1. And open for backlinks, wheel, though be prepared for excessive levels of ludditism.
>.US
3rd level .US domains were free back a few years ago. You just had to agree to administer 4th level requests, zone files and such. The naming protocol was set. Cities use ci.whatever.statecode.us
Counties were co.whatever.statecode.us
I have about a 100 of the whatevers.
site:.gov inurl:blog “post a comment”
You could also modify each string with the following: inurl:guestbook
or inurl:blog "your thoughts" , inurl:"post a comment" inurl:wordpress etc etc.
A word of warning, if you overdo this sort of search, Google used to reject the search after a few times...not sure if they still do this.
site:.gov inurl:blogs"post a comment"-"comments closed"-"you must be logged in"
[edited by: DavidKeffen at 11:35 pm (utc) on Jan. 16, 2009]
Of course on topic counts for quite a bit as well; it's probably part of the reason paid links work so well. But there's more than one way to skin a cat :).
If you take the approach that 'trust' flows through links like pagerank does, then this link makes more sense.
Always better to build links by creating authority sites.
