Where to Get Backlinks to Your Site – Part 2 – 12 Web 2.0 Sites

(Note. Things you’ll find inside this post: a list of 12 web 2.0 sites you can use to get backlinks from by building custom webpages.)

I’m serious about this series, so here’s the second part. Just so you know what this is all about – in this series I’m sharing some places where you can get backlinks to your site. The first part was about article directories (make sure to check it out if you haven’t already).

This second part is about getting backlinks from web 2.0 sites. Sorry, I wasn’t able to come up with a better name … I know “web 2.0 sites” is not perfect and doesn’t give a clear enough explanation.

Here’s the thing. Basically, nowadays most of the websites out there are web 2.0 sites – sites where the content is created by users (either the whole content or some part of it). Some quick examples: YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, online forums, wordpress.com, Flickr, etc. The “web 2.0” category is very broad.

However, what I want to share with you today is a list of sites that allow you to create a free website as part of their main domain address. In other words – sites where you can go and create more sites (!) … it doesn’t get more web 2.0 than this.

Being the Good Guy

Before I give you the list let me quickly explain one thing. These web 2.0 sites are not venues designed purely to give people places where they can do some link building. You can’t just “produce some content” and slap it onto a web 2.0 site.

Remember that you’re creating real websites there. So you need some real, quality information if you want your site not to get banned.

Web 2.0 sites provide many cool modules you can use. For example: text, videos, Amazon listings, Twitter streams, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, eBay listings, Google News blocks, Delicious bookmarks blocks, polls, and much more.These modules can surely help you to provide a rich user experience for whoever stumbles upon your site.

And that’s essentially the purpose – you’re providing quality content and rich user experience, and as a reward you get to link to one of your sites. That’s the correct way around.

Get backlinks from quality web 2.0 sites

Similar to the article directory situation, on one side there are popular and respected web 2.0 sites, and on the other there are not so popular ones. Choosing the former will give you the biggest chance of actually attracting real people to your site and also the most quality links possible (which is great for SEO).

Besides, you don’t want to see your newly created site gone after a couple of weeks because the main site owners are no longer interested in running the business, so they’ve decided to shut down the whole domain address. It’s something that’s just not going to happen with respected providers who have been there for years.

12 web 2.0 sites worth using

Let’s start with the most respected player in the game.

1. http://www.squidoo.com/

Squidoo is a project of Seth Godin’s (read his blog!). It’s a platform that lets you create a single webpage, focused on a single topic. What’s great about Squidoo is that it lets you to use a number of various modules to create something that’s much more interesting than a single page of text.

Some of the things you can place on a Squidoo lens (Squidoo webpage) are: text modules (duh), table of contents, Amazon links and listings, guestbooks, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, polls, and many more.

Just to give you an idea what a Squidoo lens looks like, here are some examples:

• Kite Aerial Photography
• Mustache On A Stick
• Best Coconut Macaroons Recipe

Of course, when you create your lens you can link it to one of your websites with a targeted anchor text. If your lens is of good quality it will get a high ranking on Google by itself, therefore giving the link some extra juice.

I personally like Squidoo very much. The platform is well designed, easy to use and hosts hundreds of great lenses. The fact that it’s also a great place to get backlinks from makes it even better.

Ok, on with the list.

2. http://hubpages.com/

This is somewhat similar to Squidoo only not that well designed … sorry. And the links have the “nofollow” attribute. Still, hubs can get a high ranking on Google by themselves.

3. http://www.weebly.com/

4. http://www.webs.com/

5. http://www.jimdo.com/

6. http://www.yola.com/

7. http://www.webnode.com/

8. http://www.webstarts.com/

9. http://www.ucoz.com/

10. http://www.doodlekit.com/

11. http://www.wix.com/ (Flash based)

12. http://www.moonfruit.com/ (Flash based)

Just a word about numbers 11 and 12. Both Wix and Moonfruit let you create Flash based sites only. That’s not a very important fact from a visitor standpoint. However, it is important from an SEO perspective.

If you don’t know what Flash is, it’s a platform created by Adobe. I don’t want to get into all the boring details, so essentially, Flash based websites are those with fancy animations where everything is moving, jumping, zooming, singing, and whatnots.

The only problem with it is that Google has a really hard time reading and indexing the content within a Flash based site. This means that they don’t see any links that are inside the Flash structure. And this means that those links don’t count as links.

The only reason for using such sites as part of your backlinking strategy is to hope that someday Google will be able to read them properly. ([edit] Some say that it’s already happened.)

The next part of this series is coming soon so don’t miss it. Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed or email updates to get the posts delivered to you the minute they are created.

And again – comments much appreciated. Don’t hesitate to share if you have some more web 2.0 sites worth including here.