Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

I received a question from a reader the other day asking about a specific technique used to find .EDU sites (websites with an education domain extension often thought of highly by the search engines) that you can place your links on.

Unfortunately the question was a bit too specific and out of context for me to answer.

Instead I thought I’d talk about using “FootPrints” to find new places to drop your links on in more general terms. Most veterans will know this but I thought it would be useful for anyone relatively new to the game.

When we refer to “FootPrints” we are referring to specific “identifiers” common to many different websites – generally all using the same platform to manage their websites (or a part of their website).

We can work out what these “identifiers” are and then conduct very specific search terms in order to find all similar websites like this.

Perhaps the most obvious example would be the “Powered By WordPress” search term.

Unless the blogger has specifically removed this “attribution” (which requires an average knowledge of tweaking the code in WordPress) – pretty much every blog out there running on WordPress has “Powered By WordPress” attached to the footer, of every page, of their entire blog.

Knowing that, we can construct a search term to find all blogs running WordPress (roughly – it’s not 100% accurate due to duplicate results, many results per blog, and other issues of people simply writing that term on their own websites).

Here it is in its most basic form…

“Powered By WordPress”

That returns about 67 million results.

You can then go through those results to find blogs you might want to leave a comment on, work out link arrangements with, post trackbacks to etc. Of course, it’s far to general to be of much use and we can get more specific.

Let’s get more targeted to a specific niche. Say we want to find all blogs related to “Dog Training”. Here’s the search query term we would use to do that…

“Powered By WordPress” + “Dog Training”

…that returns about 81,000 results. Basically the search query is saying “show me all blogs that are running WordPress that are also related to Dog Training”.

That becomes much more useful as we now have a very targeted list of blogs that we might be able to work with to generate links (or do whatever we want with).

We can get more specific still.

Let’s say we only want blogs running WordPress, related to Dog Training, that also have an education domain extension.

Here’s the search query for that…

“Powered By WordPress” + “Dog Training” + site:.edu

…and it returns around 90 results.

Assume we don’t care about the domain extension. Instead we want to know specifically which blogs related to dog training actually allow us to leave a comment on (and potentially a new link).

Here we go…

“Powered By WordPress” + “Dog Training” + “Leave A Comment”

…that returns a very specific list of around 118,000 results that you could potentially leave a comment (and your link) on related to “Dog Training”. Again, nothing is totally full proof – the results are only as accurate as what the search engine provide – but it should show you what’s possible when working with FootPrint search queries.

You could pass that list on to your link builder and have them go to town leaving relevant blog comments all over the show.

Obviously you can change the “Dog Training” part of the search query to anything appropriate to your niche market – and the more specific the search term – the more specific your results will be.

Further you can also use whatever domain extension you want if we’re talking about finding specific domain types (.com, .edu, .mil, .org etc).

We can also change the platform entirely and rather than using WordPress, use another popular blogging platform – let’s say Moveable Type.

In this case we can find all blogs using this platform with the following query…

“Powered by Movable Type”

…we can find all blogs related to Dog Training running this platform using this query…

“Powered by Movable Type” + “Dog Training”

…we can find all “Dog Training” blogs running Moveable Type that accept comments using this query…

“Powered by Movable Type” + “Dog Training” + “Post A Comment”

You will notice that in the above example we have changed “Leave A Comment” to “Post A Comment”. That’s because the first is only common and relevant to WordPress, the second is common to Moveable Type.

Whenever you want to find new footprints you need to first identify the “common factor” that is unique and these are generally different between different platforms. More often that not the best place to start looking for footprints for anything is in the footer of the website in question – where most branding occurs for 3^rd party platforms.

Ok so the above would be very useful if you wanted to generate targeted lists of places that you can leave relevant blog comments on (as just one example of what such a list could be used for).

Know that there are a few tools out there (which I’ll review and let you know about in future posts) that can perform these searches – harvest the results into a database, remove duplicate URL’s, find out the Page Rank of the blogs (or websites) in order to prioritize focus on so forth. This is when using footprints becomes pretty powerful stuff.

Here are a few other “FootPrints” you can play around with (keep in mind the additional factors you can add to these to narrow things down into more focused lists)…

“Powered By vBulletin” – Finds all discussion forums running vBulletin software.

“Powered By phpBB” – Finds all discussion forums running phpBB software.

“You can leave a response, or trackback” – Finds blogs that have comments and trackbacks enabled.

intitle: “Dog Training” – Finds all web pages that are specifically targeting “Dog Training” in the title field of their web pages (useful to find out how many exact competitors you have for any given keyword term.

“Dog Training” + “write for us” (OR “write for me”) – Finds websites that are looking for content related to Dog Training.

“Dog Training: + “submit url” – Finds websites related to dog training that will accept a URL submission (i.e. directories etc).

…as you can see the possibilities are pretty much endless.

BTW – if you’ve ever wondered how you get targeted by spammers this should answer your question. They find you through such footprints and generally have software applications that harvest websites and auto post (comments, forum posts etc) to do it on a massive scale.

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