Within the SEO world, we SEO professionals pay a lot of attention to backlinks, and some attention to PageRank (which really does have an impact on your ranking ability, just not huge naymore). But what if I told you that you could get a bunch of dofollow backlinks with the anchor text of your choice from a site whose domain is PageRank 8? Oh, and those backlinks won’t cost you a dime?
This is the kind of thing that makes SEO professionals sit up and take notice — and it’s a little gift from Google to you when you sign up for Google+.
Your Google+ profile includes a “links” section on the right sidebar. You can choose what (if any) links to put there and choose the anchor text of those links. They are dofollow, and Google+ is a PageRank 8 domain — and you’d better believe that Google pays attention to Google+!
In addition, anything that you +1 will show up as a link on Google+ (if you choose to turn on that feature — it defaults to turned off) in a separate tab on your profile, and those are also dofollow backlinks.
Some important things to note, however:
- Your profile must be public to benefit from this — it has to be indexed after all. Note that you can have your profile public but still keep your posts private if you want — just one of the many fantastic privacy features of Google+
- You must choose to set your +1s as public to benefit from that (I don’t)
Here’s a video that shows you exactly where you can find the link areas on Google+ (note the video does not mention that you need these areas set to public for it to be indexed — don’t forget that step):