This was so cool that I just had to pass it along. If you want to rank well in the search engines you need other websites to link to yours. Link building is the difficult process of getting those inlinks. One of the problems that you might come across during a link building campaign is that once you find a site that you would really like to get a link from sometimes you can’t find any contact info for the webmaster.
This tip was presented in a comment by Brent David Payne to a fine article about link building by Melanie Nathan on the SEOmoz.org blog:
…Go to: https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/forget-login.jsp
Type in a domain name that you know is registered with NetSol (i.e. Amazon.com). Click GO.
Select the bottom Radio Button (I am not one of the above . . .). Click GO.
Copy their NIC Handle and insert it into the appropriate place of this URL:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?nichandle=[putNIChandlehere]
Poof . . . done, everytime. So private registration only stops the lazy spammers. The funny part is that no captchas occur through the whole process . . .
Brent David Payne
Melanie Suggests in her article that you examine and target the backlinks of your competition to link to your site – great advice. If your sites are related then those webmasters may be just as inclined to link to you.
One way to really home in on who might be inclined to link to your site is to use Jim Boykins common backlink tool to find out who links to several related websites. If you’re in a niche like energy efficiency or green construction you might just find some authority sites that are building their own niche directories and would be happy to give you a valuable link.
There are several ways for you to find out what your competitors (or your own) backlinks are, but probably the easiest is to go to Yahoo! and type this into the search box: link:http://www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com - this will fire up Yahoo! Site explorer and give you a list of links coming into the site in question. The same search string will also work in Google, but the list will be much shorter – Google apparently only lists the links from sites that they think are important.
For more information on link building and search engine optimization in general you should check out SEOmoz.org - my favorite.
Tags: Search Engine Optimization //
Thanks for the call-out!
Glad you liked the advice. Take a look at one of the other comments I made on that same thread about utilizing Alexa’s Web Service to download hundreds of sites in a given DMOZ category. If you want more information about it in order to build your post, let me know via email.