A while back, I did an experiment trying to prove that while Twitter links are marked as nofollow, that they actually ARE followed.

I had a registered, but never-used domain. Google searches for the domain name yielded zero results. I published a simple, static HTML page (no possibility of trackbacks/pinging/RSS/etc.), and tweeted a link from a public Twitter account (the published link was nofollowed). Within 16 hours, the page was picked up and indexed.

This alone tells us multiple things:

1. Links on Twitter accounts can be followed, regardless of the link state. I’m sure that some spammy accounts are “sandboxed” and not followed, but for the sake of discussion, we’re referring to good accounts.
2. The next logical step here is to push for a self-hosted short URL service. Even though most services (like bit.ly) do 301-redirects, it’s better for it to redirect from your own domain.
3. Links from good Twitter accounts are a probable ranking metric.

My personal Twitter account currently has a SEOMoz Page Authority of 58. That’s pretty respectable. So, it’s not crazy to assume some of that will get passed (Google did crawl the link, after all). If nothing else, it’s a great way to get a site indexed quickly!

In my most recent research, I’ve come to discover that the high PR versus relevancy debate is less important than most think.

The typical procedure for creating backlinks (from high PR sites) usually goes as follows: pick a keyword or a couple of keywords, start linking from high PR sites, and then wait for the traffic to come in on those keywords via boosted SERP rankings.

The relevant linking is much more drawn out. Join some sort of community, build a relationship, and people will naturally link to you, but most likely from low-PR sites that are usually, in the end, NOT relevant.

For the most powerful linking strategy, we need to combine the best parts of both procedures, and create one supercharged backlinking plan.

High-PR advantages:
1. High PR (obviously)
2. Bigger PR voting to Google

Relevancy advantages:
1. Narrowed scope of potential visitors (however, for normal backlinking, this isn’t really something we should worry about yet)
2. Diverse spread of anchor text

Take a look at the italicized items: High PR and diverse anchor text. I’ll skip the high PR one, since we all know that high PR is preferable, and focus on the second one; diverse anchor text.

Unless you stumble upon something that becomes an Internet meme overnight, building a lot of links in a relevant, organic manner will take months. The only benefit from this method is the diversity of anchor text that links back to your site. While you might have a site dedicated to “green widgets”, you could easily have anchor text linked from someone’s blog that reads “cool widget”, and yet another that used “cheapest widget I’ve found online”. Extrapolate a decent organic linking pace over a year, and you’ll have a respectable amount of backlinks with hugely varying anchor text.

Now, with the amount of refereeing that Google (and the other search engines) have been doing recently, it’s starting to become less easy to quickly build a library of links without unwillingly participating in the Google Dance.

So, how can we avoid this? Internet memes seem relatively unaffected by the Google Dance, yet it’s possible for thousands of links to a site to happen overnight.

By creating backlinks with a very diverse (15-20 at least) set of widely varying anchor texts (albeit linking back to one or two key pages), it’s possible (but not guaranteed) to sidestep Google’s penchant to temporarily penalize a page that suddenly gains a large number of incoming links. We know that this likely to work in most scenarios because of the way that Google already handles hot trends: by not penalizing seemingly organic waves of backlinks. It also gives the impression that the links are much less likely to be automatically generated, and the endpoint site is more likely relevant within a larger cross-section of varied, but related contexts for your subject/keyword..

Essentially, you’re creating your own “hot trend”, and because of the varying anchor texts, you’ll have a stronger position over a greater number of what should be longer-tail keywords (if you follow the formula for creating your anchor texts that I’ll show later).

Here’s the formula that I typically use, and seems to work fairly well:

50-60% of your anchor texts should be keywords containing the root keyword that vary slightly. For example, “red widgets”, “blue widgets”, and “green widgets” would all be good if you want to target “widgets”. You could even do something like “widgets repair”. They should all be (assuming you have a single-word keyword) 2 or 3 words, but preferably 2 words.

Some people will tell you that it doesn’t matter what the rest are, as long as they are somewhat relevant, but I disagree. I’ll take about half of what’s left (20-25%) and make up a short sentence with your keyword in it, and create a phrase anchor text. “I found a shop that repairs the special edition orange widgets for half of what the dealership does.” I would then use the full sentence for linking, and actually link only the italicized text as the anchor text. I will also make about 10 variations of sentences, repeating them only a few times (if at all).

As far as the rest of the links (20-25%), I will usually pick 3-5 high-converting, long-tail keywords (use AdWords to test for click-through rates from Google), and backlink those without ANY modification to the word itself.

So, to recap:
50-60% – Variation of primary keyword
20-25% – Phrase within a sentence, loosely-related to main keyword but highly relevant
20-25% – Only long-tail keywords, higher traffic ones with good conversion preferred

Try out this method in your next round of linking, and see if you can skip the Google Dance altogether!