How To Use Google To Find Your SEO Backlinks

Anyone can tell you that backlinks are no doubt the disputed heavy weight champion of the SEO world. However, not everyone can tell you how and where to get quality backlinks. What if there's a way to have Google tell you where to get backlinks? Well, good news there is a way, and I'm going to show you!

But first, for those who are just starting out, lets describe what a backlink is.

In the most simplest term, a backlink is nothing more then one site linking to your site. Now that one site can be anything from articles, press releases, videos, blogs, forums, social bookmark sites, paid links, free link exchange...etc. Anything that has a link pointing to your site that you want to rank on Google is considered a backlink.

Now, having said that, I want to express the difference between spamming backlinks verses quality backlinks. Google has become pretty dang smart over the years in determining what they deem as an authority site to show up on their rankings to best match the search terms that were typed in the Google search bar.

There will always be opinions on this matter because SEO is not a proven science. It changes continually. However, backlinks are still the driving force behind what shows up in the search results. Think of a backlink as a vote for your site. If I link to your site from my site, it's basically saying "Hey, I agree with your site, it's relevant to my topic and adds value". In the big picture, the one with the most votes wins.

Long gone are the days of link spamming. Google's algorithm has developed considerable in the last 5 years. Google continually strives to deliver the best search results to the end user and because of this, Google's filters are always changing to provide the top qualified sites that relates to the search topic. For example, if I typed in the keyword "dog grooming" into Google, I would expect to find a site about "dog grooming". Right?

Now let's say there are two websites competing for the top search results position. Website "A" has 50 backlinks from other sites that are related to "dog grooming" and website "B" has 50 backlinks from completely unrelated websites like "muscle cars" or "house cleaning products" who do you think will win? Google is able to figure that out. And of course website "A" will appear more as an authority site then website "B" thus obtaining that top search position.

So how does this all play into our scheme of finding backlinks? Well aside from the self generated content that of course will be related to our topic of choice. I like to use Google to show me where I can find related sites I can get a quality related backlink from.

There are two different types of backlinks:

1) Do Follow - Basically allows the link to pass a vote to your site.

2) No Follow - Basically does not allow the link to pass a vote for your site

Both have their importance in SEO, but for this topic we are going to go after the Do Follow Links without getting to complicated. I highly recommend you use a Firefox plugin that will tell you which links are Do Follows or No Follows. There's many plugins out there, but I like to use Quirk Search Status. It will highlight all No Follow links red, so at a quick glance I will immediately know if a site is worth putting my backlink on it or not.

OK Now you have your plug in and your ready to have Google do the work for you!

Here are some good places for back links.

Blog Comments:

There are blogs that allow users to comment on their posts using a widget called "Keyword Luv" What that allows the commenter to do, is put there name and their anchor text on the comment form. So the result is a backlink with your keyword to your site.

So how does one find these blogs?

Type the following line in the Google search bar (yes use the "quotes" too):


"YourName@YourKeyword in the name field to take advantage"+"Your Keyword"

Do not change "YourName@YourKeyword", but you do need to replace the second "Your Keyword" with a keyword related to your site. So back to our Dog Grooming site we would type:


"YourName@YourKeyword in the name field to take advantage"+"dog grooming"

Google will find all the sites that allow you to comment using keyword backlinks. Click on each result and look for the sites that don't have red highlighed links (from our cool Firefox plug in) in the comment section and provide an intelligent comment to one of their posts. It may take a little time to find them, but when you do, bookmark those sites so you can use them later.

Forum Commenting:

Another great place to get backlinks is forum comments. Most forums allow you to have a signature file with your link in it. Your signature file is connected to your comments. So every time you comment, you get a backlink. Not only do you get a backlink on forums, but if you comment with added value, people will start to trust you and naturally check out what your doing (free traffic...).

Type this in Google with the "quotes"


inurl:forums"Your Keyword"

What this is asking Google is, show me all the forums related to "Your Keyword". This will bring up all forum sites in the search results.

For our Dog Grooming site we would type:


inurl:forums"dog grooming"

Look through the forum comments to make sure the signature links are not highlighted in red.

Finding.edu and.gov websites

Getting backlinks from Educational and Government site is not easy to do. Google seems to put more weight on these types of backlinks. So if that's the case, then lets get some juicy backlinks!

Type this into Google with "quotes"


site:.edu "post a comment"+"Your Keyword"

This is telling Google to go out and find me a Educational site that I can comment on that's related to my keyword.


site:.gov "post a comment"+"Your Keyword"

This is telling Google to go out and find me a Government site that I can comment on that's related to my keyword.

Make sure you replace "Your Keyword" with your actual keyword your ranking for

I encourage you to add these powerful backlinking techniques to obtain more quality related backlinks to your normal SEO campaigns.