Big Brand Link Building: Identifying Link Opportunities via Misspellings

Everyone makes typos, including respected webmasters and journalists. If you are link building for brands you need to be two things – scalable and efficient. You can’t spend your time emailing individual sites who may or may not be interested in your content – you need wins. You can either create engaging content and make people want to link to you… or if you are a big enough brand you can find the people who meant to link to you.

Note: if you have a domain that is under five letters, this is going to be pretty difficult and won’t give you nearly the amount of ROI a longer domain name will.

Obligatory hat tip: This strategy originated from a discovery Wil Reynolds made in the search church one weekend, I just figured out how to scale it.

Step 1)

Go to Aaron Wall’s Keyword Misspelling tool and put in your brand’s domain name. Check every single option.

Step 2)

Copy all of the misspelled domains, put them into excel in column A and put your TLD into column B.

Step 3)

Concatenate ALL the things!!

Step 4)

Copy and paste all of the misspelled domains into Majestic’s bulk backlinks tool and organize by amount of links.

Step 5)

Unfortunately, my blog is brand new and has zero links, but for brands this is a goldmine:

Bank of America:

Wells Fargo:

Business Week:

A lot of brands already own the misspellings of their domain names, but that doesn’t mean they are always redirected correctly.

Step 6)

Pull all the URLs that have links into excel and use =httpstatus() from SEO Tools for Excel.

Step 7)

Filter for 302s and 200s and check out the sites manually. If they are parked domains try and acquire them. If you can’t acquire them, contact the webmasters of the most valuable links and ask for the links to be corrected. If they are 302s and the brand owns them, have them change them to 301s. Easy link wins. F.T.W.