Link Building with Laconica

July 6, 2011 by
Filed under: Link Building 

Laconica (now renamed StatusNet) is an open source social networking script that very nearly duplicates the look and feel of twitter. The software allows you to create a profile, post frequent small status updates, tag friends, and join groups that are you interested in. There are thousands of web servers that have been running the script for a very long period of time, and as we all know, this means the links you get from these websites will be stronger. The sites are also updated so frequently that Google crawls them very often, meaning you can use these sites to quickly index your new sites, or to speed up the indexing time on your new blog posts/pages.

The first step is to open google and enter the following search query:
“is a microblogging service brought to you by” “public timeline” “minutes ago”

This is the footprint that will show us all of the websites running either the original Laconica or the more recently updated StatusNet script of which we can build links from. It does not take a lot of searching around to see that a lot of these websites have a very nice amount of backlinks, some of the more popular ones being PR6 and PR7. Now these are the sites that you want some link juice from.

There are multiple ways to get links on sites running Laconica/StatusNet. The simplest way is to register on these websites and post your own status update. The sites do not allow HTML or anchor text links, so your best bet is to put together a unique sentence that contains your URL in the middle of it, or at the very least put your keywords before your URL… example:
link building blog http://uberlinkbuilding.com

These links will appear briefly on the homepage of the site running the Laconica script, and generally not stay there for more than a few minutes/hours/days depending on how popular the site is. This may or may not be enough to get your URL crawled a lot by Google, however it is an extra permanent backlink so it isn’t to be ignored.

The real link building power comes from the Laconica Groups pages. After you have registered and posted your status update, you will want to move over to the page on the homepage called “Groups,” and then click on “Start your own.” If you are having trouble finding the Groups link on some of the sites, it usually works to add /group/new to the end of the homepage URL (example: http://site.com/group/new ) after logging in.

When creating your Group, make sure to have your primary keyword as the “Full Name” of the group, and include a decent description. After that your group should be live and you should have multiple links from every site you register on, including a powerful link from the group page that will get the search engines crawling your site a lot more frequently and send you some nice SEO benefit.

Comments

One Comment on Link Building with Laconica

  1. Mike DeWolfe on Sun, 18th Sep 2011 11:24 am

    2. I just tried to get into status.net — the register link asks for your email, it refuses a GMail address. Then, it sends you an email with a link to registration (the same where you started). OpenID is accepted, but the result is a white screen of death. I’ve heard of status.net / Laconica and know people can use it, but it seems walled off to new users.

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