In just a few minutes, you can gain two high-quality links from one of the web’s most popular social networking sites, LinkedIn. Not only do they offer great page authority, but they also pass link juice from your public profile. Here’s what to do:
1. Login to your LinkedIn account and select “Edit My Profile” from the drop-down menu.
2. Scroll down your profile page until you see where your links to the websites of your choice are listed. Note that you are allowed to list three different links here. LinkedIn offers the choice of using custom anchor text for each link or selecting one of several choices from a drop-down menu. Go ahead and select “Other” for your first link and then type in the anchor text of your choice (optimized, of course, for relevant keywords) and then paste in the URL. This link will be no-followed, but it will have perfect anchor text and still give you a link from an authoritative site. Relevant anchor text and site authority are two important measures in determining link value, as is the PageRank or amount of link juice a link passes (usually determined by PageRank when doing a quick-and-dirty analysis of a link’s value).
3. Next, select “My Blog” and “My Website” for your second and third links. Paste in the appropriate URLs for each one. The bummer is that you cannot choose custom anchor site for these two links. But the awesome news is that not only will these links will not only come from an authoritative, high-ranking site, they will also pass link juice to the blog and website they lead to.
4. Click “Save Changes” and you are done.
5. To verify that I am not pulling the wool over your eyes (or just for fun), you might wish to look at your source code of your public profile to make sure that the links are neither redirected nor no-followed for “My Blog” and “My Website.” Remember, your public profile is the one with your custom URL. For instance, mine can be viewed at http://linkedin.com/in/christycorrell/. The one with the messy URL is the one you can only see when you are logged in. All links in the “Websites” section of your profile with the messy URL will be redirected.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent article and thanks for telling that how to get quick dofollow link thanks for posting.
Which type of link would be most beneficial for rankings:
1. A nofollowed link with good anchor text.
or
2. A dofollowed link with poor anchor text.
I would guess the answer is the second, but I’m not sure. Any ideas?
@James – I would much rather have a dofollowed link with poor anchor text than a nofollowed link with good anchor text … unless that nofollowed link is on Wikipedia
Hey Christy, nice tip! Although, you might want to fix the link to your Linked In profile – it’s missing a .com
Thanks, Mike. I am glad you found the post useful. And thanks for the heads-up on the typo. Fixed it!
Yup, I can attest to this. I followed these tips and saw it’s right. Thanks for sharing. Now waiting for some traffic send in by LinkedIn. LOL!
Nice! Any idea if any other social media sites include do follow links in their user’s profile pages?
Of course, this will likely result in an avalanche of spam accounts on LinkedIn… nothing new about that though.
Tried it and all three links (Other, My Website and My Blog) are redirects without nofollow. Don’t know if that’s a good kind of redirect. Any info on how they pass link juice?
Great post. What are your thoughts on making all three links have keywords as opposed to one keyword link and the other two being My blog and My website?
I do not know of any other major social media sites that follow links on user profile pages. Please let me know if you run across any that do! No-follow links on the most popular social media sites seem to boost the authority of the sites they are linked to a bit in the search engine’s eyes, in my experience. And linking to highly authoritative sources that you cite in your blog posts, online newsletter articles, etc. may also give a slight boost to your site’s credibility in the search engine’s eyes. (Heck, even if it doesn’t, at least it gives your readers more reasons to trust you. And if you are quoting material, it is plagiarism if you don’t cite your source.)
Hi Nathan, I would rather have the link juice so am going with My Blog and My Website plus one no-follow keyword-rich link for now. It wouldn’t hurt to do some testing, though, by setting up profiles with variations … well, as long as LinkedIn doesn’t kill your real profiles as a result! Let me know if you decide to test various combinations of keyword-rich and do-follow links on LinkedIn profiles. I would be very interested in the results.
Andriy, if you log out of your profile and type in the custom URL for your public LinkedIn profile (mine is http://www.linkedin.com/in/christycorrell/ and THEN look at the code, there will not be redirects on the links for “My Website” and “My Blog.” If you look at the code for your own profile while still logged into LinkedIn, however, you will see that there are redirects on all of your personal links.
I’ve followed this tutorial and it works. Excellent tip. As a note, the “My RSS Feed” adds a “nofollow” tag. Thanks.