Article:

Find and Reclaim the Links Pointing to Your Old Guide Site
(written in 2001)

by Eric Ward

Many of you know me from my LinkMensch column over
at ClickZ.  I spend most of my daily life involved in linking
related activities.  Here's a small bit of linking advice that
can help you build a new network of links to your new
site.

The search engines are slow to purge old URLs. This means
they still have all the references to the sites that were
linking to your old About.com guide URL.  You can find the
sites that linked to your old About.com guide URL and seek
new links to your new guide, thus shortening the time it
will take to rebuild your readers.

You can do this by using the individual search engines or
by using a free tool like http://www.linkpopularity.com

Here's a three-pronged approach to finding your old inbound
links.

First use a search engine like Google, enter the full name of your
previous Guide Site, and look at the results. Those results
will likely contain sites that linked to your old site.  Save the results
to your hardrive or bookmark the results page.  You can then
visit each of these sites and send them a short Email message
announcing your new URL.  I suggest you create a table in
MS Excel to keep up with the sites that link to you.  Add fields
for the contact names and email addresses too. That way
when you make changes to your new guide you can quickly
send a message to the sites that link to you letting them
know what's new with your site.

Second, go to the free tool http://www.linkpopularity.com
enter your old About.com guide URL, and the results
will only contain sites that linked to your old site.  This is a fast
way to begin the process of rebuilding a network of links
to your site.

It can seem daunting to perform linking activities, so just contact
a few every day to let them know your new URL.  Note that you
can also check for links to any internal sections of your old
About.com guide, if you happen to remember the exact URL
for them.

Third, since your new site is not part of a larger network, you
may be able to more easily get links to it at the major directories
like Netscape Open Directory (free), LookSmart, and Yahoo!
who previously often ignored About.com guides asking for links.
Remember that Netscape Open Directory often gives multiple links
as long as you submit to categories for which you have relevant
content.  Yahoo charges $299 a year now, but if you launched
your new guide at a .org domain, they wont charge you anything.
You might even consider mirroring your new site at a .org domain
so you can get a free link at Yahoo and LookSmart and get
free indexing from Inktomi.

You also have to rebuild your own set of outbound links to
resources from your old Net Links section. It might seem tempting
to use one of the third party link management tools for managing
your outbound links, especially since you have to do all of it on
your own. I strongly suggest you DO NOT do this.  These third
party links management tools host your collection of links on their
server. This is not something you want to do. Maintain your
outbound links on your own site only.

Lastly, many of you published newsletters, which you no longer
have access to the subscriber list for.  You can keep publishing your
newsletter through a service like Yahoo Groups, but
if there's no way to get access to your old About.com subscriber
list you'll have to rebuild that one at a time. You might want to take
30 minutes to set up your free account with either of the above
services. That way you can have a subscriber box on your site
right from the start.

I hope this has been of some help to you.

Eric Ward

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