The online travel industry is a competitive business and we all know that high organic rankings can yield huge rewards.
Finding high impact backlink opportunities for travel related websites can be tough so I thought I’d share a few gems here.
These opportunities will give you some actionable takeaways as well as some great ideas on how to find more of the same.
The thing I’ve focused on specifically with these is high site/page authority.
Okay, let’s dive in!
1. Donate!
Paying for links is a no-no, we’re all aware of this, but donating to a site and getting referenced for it (with a link) is not only acceptable, it’s an amazing way to get some high PR authority and put a smile on someone’s face.
There are really a lot of websites out there which will give you a link for a small donation, say $10.
To help you find these I recommend using some of the following operators but also try and creative with your own searches…
“make a donation”
“contributor page”
“sponsor page”
“link back to your site” + “donations”
As I said, get creative with this and you’ll find some great opportunities.
2. Buy an Expired Travel Domain to 301 Redirect
Head over to ExpiredDomains.net and type in a keyword like ‘travel’ or something else related. Use the filter to select ‘only free domains’ and chose .com, .net or .org – the others are generally junk.
Now order the list according to backlinks (BL) and run your eye down looking for domains that have a decent backlink (BL) to referring domain (DP) ratio.
Once you see one that looks okay head over to MajesticSEO, drop it in and hit explore. Bear in mind that the numbers you see on Expired Domains can be very different from the numbers you see in Majestic SEO.
Basically you want to find a domain which has a ‘referring domain’ to ‘external backlink’ ratio of less than one-to-ten. For example, if a domain has 150 referring domains, you want there to be less than 1500 external backlinks.
You also want the trust flow and citation flow to be ideally over 20, although these can be hard to find. Definitely don’t buy anything under 15.
It can take a while to find a gem but when you do jump over to your domain name registrar (I use NameCheap) and lock it in!
Once you’ve registered the domain all you need to do is set up a 301 redirect from that domain to your travel site.
In essence this appears as though you’ve merged two sites together as discussed here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
There’s a lot of debate about the effectiveness of this around the web but I can tell you from direct experience that it just works. Period.
Here’s a good little example that was still available at the time of writing: www.peru-travel-confidential.com
3. Family-Friendly Sites
This one costs $20 a year but is more than worth it. There’s something about ‘family friendly’ that makes Google wants to clap their hands with joy and that means this site is no regular directory.
I’ve actually witnessed decent shifts in the search results just from a link on this one site.
Head over to FamilyFriendlySites.com and go to ‘Add your site’ on the left. Follow through the steps and you’ll receive an email with confirmation within 48 hours.
This is easy, safe, and very effective. Enough said.
Okay so there you have it, three actionable link opportunities for your travel website!
Hopefully it will inspire some creating link building of your own too.
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