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In the past few articles I’ve given you tips on how to find other sources of links.  While some are pretty basic, a few of the tips were more advanced.

In this article, however, I look at how you can use Google to find many more links.

As I’ve already shown, engines like Yahoo! and Clusty can provide great sources of links when used properly.

And, while I’ve indicated that link building using Google can be difficult, it’s not impossible.  You just have to know how to get the most out of the engine.

I’m going to give you tips on how to build links the “old fashioned way” using Google and how to create the right queries to acquire potential links.

For this exercise you will need a spreadsheet, knowledge on simple formulas and a whole lot of time.

Let’s start with the basics:

As you know, you can build all sorts of queries in Google to find all sorts of things.  And, while your typical “link:domain.com” query will return most of the links to a given site, it will not return all of them.  Further, Google claims that the list returned is actually only a random sampling and that we should not put any weight on those links. 

In other words, just because a link is listed in the number 1 position doesn’t make it the most important according to Google.

So, what do you do if you’ve gone through all the competitor’s links?  What next?

This is where the spreadsheet and formulas come in.  And, what I’m about to explain here does work because I’ve done it myself.

I must warn you though, this can be a time consuming process as the “hunt and gather” stages take some time.  But, in the end, you could be surprised by the number and quality of links you can get just by investing this time.

Let’s look at other sites you can get a link from.  They include other search engines and topical directories.  In my previous article on about DMOZ, I illustrated how you can use the popular directory to find potential link opportunities. We’re going to use Google to do something similar and it’s such a simple thing you may wonder how you got by without it.

We know Google does keyword matching.  You put in a query for “dog bones” and you get back sites using that term.

So, what happens when you put in the query “submit a site”?  After all, that’s what you want to do right? Submit your site to other locations.

What you will see is a list of other directories and search engines that may provide links back to you.

Of course, there are other similar queries you can use such as “add site”, “add link”, “request link”, “submit url”, “submit site”, “submit your site”, “submit link”, and “add url”, just to name a few.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  Using just these few queries, you’re bound to find hundreds of potential link opportunities.  And, of course you would want to expand that list with any other variation of the “submit link” query you can come up with.  Phrases such as “recommend site” and “suggest a site” and so on.

Build your list of these types of queries (I have about 50 like this) and just look at the volume of sites you could add your link to. Many are free directories that don’t garner a lot of traffic, but the link popularity you could inherit could be huge.

Now, let’s refine these queries a little more.

We all know Google prefers topical, related links so why not give this to them?

What if you were to combine those queries you came up with above with your important key phrases?

For example, let’s say you sell hubcaps.  When I search for “submit link” hubcaps, I get over 350 results returned.  That means over 350 potential new links to your hubcap site.  Now, what if you do this with all your other queries?  Again, you could end up with hundreds or thousands of potential links.

This is where the spreadsheet comes in.

What I’ve found is that you can use formulas in a spreadsheet like Excel to automate the query building process.

Excel has a great feature called “Concatenate” which allows you to join the contents of cells to create a new string.

What I’ve done is placed all my “addurl” type strings in one column and my keywords in another column and then concatenated the two to generate the queries I need to paste into Google’s search box.

So, if I have 5 important phrases and use my 50 “add a link” type queries, I come up with 250 queries to submit to Google to find sites to submit my link to.  Even if I only get 100 results per query, that’s still 2500 potential links!

Here’s where it becomes time consuming – you must go through each of these links and qualify them.  But, again, this is where the spreadsheet comes in handy.

What I do as I’m reviewing these sites is look at the toolbar PageRank for the home page and the directory page where my site link will likely be.  Then, I grab the URL required to submit my link and paste all that information into my spreadsheet.

Once I’ve gone through most of these sites I reorder the list of potential links, usually by the PageRank of the home page, or the page where my link will reside, and then begin the submission process.

Like I said, it is a very time consuming process but one that could be very fruitful in the end.

So, if you are looking for even more link building opportunities you may find this additional tactic quite helpful.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article