Steemit: How Reddit Backlinks Affect SEO
It seems if you get three upvotes on a Reddit post/link, backlinks count!
Wow. First off here is some information about the difference between nofollow and dofollow links for SEO. We want dofollow links for SEO. These are the backlinks that the Google search algorithm uses to increase rankings and start flooding traffic to a website!
Here is the Quora question Does a backlink from Reddit count positively toward a site's SEO?:
From Frank Seidel on Nov. 10, 2015
Yes, if it's a genuine one that gets upvotes. Quote from this article How Reddit Backlinks Affect SEO
"Using the Reddit upvotes algorithm Reddit assigns all newly submitted links automatically as nofollow links, but once a rating of positive three votes or more is achieved the link becomes dofollow and counts toward your search engine rankings."
Note that this is from a service that sells Reddit upvotes and there point of view might be biaised. But I can confirm from my own experience; I even already got a dofollow link with 2 upvotes (not three as mentionned in the article). I suppose that Reddit's algorithm is more evolved than just counting upvotes and also takes into account click-throughs.
Here is the link to the article Frank refers to: How Reddit Backlinks Affect SEO
Conclusion
It makes sense to get an outreach effort to get good Steemit content to be posted on Reddit and upvoted there! Maybe @xeroc's bot can allow Redditors to post orignals on Steemit and cross-post on Reddit for the backlinks? We should also encourage people to do this manually too. Another indirect hack I can think of to be more subtle is to create another 'Imgur' alternative and have users upload pics from the image sharing site to Reddit and then have a lot of links from the image sharing site to Steemit to get 'link juice'. There are other forums and websites we should also look into and other similar backlink strategies that can be effective. Anyways what are your thoughts about a Reddit backlink strategy, especially you SEO experts out there? Have any other similar ideas?
I've always been pretty impressed with the amount of traffic I see come from Reddit when I've made a concerted effort to post out to it. Because of the similarities in what Steemit has to offer with Reddit, I definitely think its going to be a lynch pin in any successful growth efforts, especially growth outside of the crypto community (which is key for viability).
The SEO impact makes sense, and just adds to the list of good reasons to start pulling Redditors into the fold on Steem.
Proposed Reddit->Steemit Strategy
Something to keep in mind: the early adopters make the community. While the end goal might be to want everyone, if we can aim for contributors of higher quality content its much, much better for making the community appeal to new people on its own merits.
The hack of hosting image here and then share those memes reddit is sneaky and effective. I like it! We've just got to be careful not to spam them with "Steem this" and "steem that". Share funny memes that makes to the front page is what would work best if the goal is SEO. If the goal is traffic, I would say having news worthy article posted here and share there without promoting ourselves directly is another great tactic.
Ya ultimately the key is more to do with backlink building than directly pimping steem. Doing that too much, too early can sometimes be worse than not doing it at all if its not done tactfully. But if we grow the SEO rank of Steemit by increasing the number of links from Reddit we can get short term traffic/signups from Reddit and let Google direct future searchers here and pimp Steemit for us ;)
I agree re: backlink building @proggr
I also agree @proggr & @cryptoctopus about being subtle.
Ooo neat. My first mention ;)
Unfortunately, it isn't really viable to get Reddit backlinks through this method, and it probably won't be indexed in most cases. The way things are going with google, it's probably better to get editorial links from real websites.
Interesting read. TYVM. I always presumed links from the likes of Reddit and indeed Steemit were nofollow by default to prevent abuse.