Link Building the Realtor.com Way

We all know building backlinks sucks. Yeah, there’s a few masochists out there who get off on putting themselves through that punishment, and to them, god bless you people. You people are crazier than batshit but the rest of us are damn glad you all claim to enjoy this crap.

What if I told you there was a better link building strategy than the one you’re using? “Bullshit,” you’d say. “SEO Hack, you’re not only a liar, but with a lie like that you’re a total asshole. May you get bombastic diarrhea for telling such a horrible lie, and about link building to boot. You, sir, are a complete dick.” Hey! No need to get personal! I’m just trying to help you out here! Damn, all you all are pretty fucking mean these days! Especially when I’m about to give you some actual free SEO advice! I mean, damn, people! Cut the Hack some slack! (Holy shit, I used a lot of exclamation points in that last paragraph. I mean a lot a lot. I’m sure there’s an English teacher turning over in her grave somewhere or something. Anyways, back to the link building advice.)

Anyways, this is a fool-proof link building strategy that anyone (well, almost anyone) who has a love of bullying and a yen for screwing other people over can put together. “What makes it so great, you lying sack of crap” you ask? You don’t have to do any of the tedious work! That’s right, with this strategy, you get backlinks without having to contact other webmasters, bother with registering in directories or shelling out any dough for those links. Too good to be true?

Okay, I might have lied exaggerated a little. There is a little bit of hard work you have to do in the beginning. Mostly, you have to go through the hassle of trademarking a word that people use. You know a realtor? Exactly. Since the housing bubble burst, every other homeless person you avoid eye contact with was a former realtor. The goal is to take a name, something general like realtor, and register it. You might have to hire an attorney for this, or you can be a crazy fucker like Jason Gambert and go it on your own. Just remember, you get what you pay for.

Registered your mark? Good. ‘Cuz now the fun begins! Now, like Realtor.com, you need to find the asshole that’s “squatting” on your domain and give them the boot. This where having a taste for bullying comes in handy, as you have to be a real asshole to steal a domain. While your at it, set up a trade association around this mark, and make people pay you to use the mark in their name.

The next part requires a bit of patience. You’ve got your web site, and you’re working the interweb like a motherfucker. But, in order for this backlink acquisition strategy to work, you need to work at getting people to join your association. Yeah, you might have to get all mafia and junk and throw a few bricks through a few windows or something. But the pay off is coming. The more people you strong arm into joining your association, the more backlinks you’re gonna’ get.

So, by now, a few years have probably gone by (I said it was easy, not quick). If you’ve done the last step well, you should have a lot of people paying you for use of the mark, and you should have been encouraging to take their business online. Hell, you might even throw a seminar in there where you give them some free SEO advice. This is where your patience is going to pay off. The goal is to get these people to build web sites, and then to work their asses off to get them to rank for important regional keywords. I cannot stress how important it is to get as many people to pay you for the mark and to encourage them to build these sites.

By now, you should know where I’m headed. “Get them to pay you for use of the mark and then get a link from them back to your site, right?” Sure, that’d work. But you want a ton of incoming links, right? Then fuck that! You need to kick this shit right up to the next level. You need to check your scruples at the door and you might have to sell your soul. Yes, this is where your yen for screwing other people comes into play. See, if you’ve played the game like the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com, you’ve built up a network of thousands of sites. And, hopefully many of those sites have featured your mark in the URL. Sure, they paid you to use the mark on their site and to call themselves that. But they haven’t paid you to use that word, your mark, in the domain, which more less means they’re representing themselves as you (see what I mean about selling your soul and dumping your morals?). And those bastards – they didn’t even ask you for permission to use your mark in their domain name!  I cannot stress enough how you need to convince yourself of that story.

So, you send them a cease and desist letter which states that they must permanently redirect their infringing domain name to your domain or to face the consequences. Most of these people are going to assume you have a ton of lawyers in your pocket, and more than likely (if you’ve done your job well) are small mom and pop operations that can’t afford an attorney for any length of time anyways. You might need to do some more bullying as well. If there’s any resistance, you might have to take the case to court. But, as long as everyone just rolls over, you reap the profits of their hard work – and their link building.

As I said, this link building strategy may not work for everybody. There’s all sorts of things that could go wrong. But, if you really think this out, you can watch the backlinks roll in the way the National Association of Realtors does.