Maximizing Link Value In Social Media Profiles

A lot of social media sites (including this one) are leaving the pink links off of the profiles. This is a great trend and I'm glad to see a trend towards allowing the link love to flow. However, if you have a profile on a huge site with tens of thousands of pages your link is buried deeeep in the site architecture. There are two ways to get more juice out of your social media profiles:

Pure White Hat

You need to engage the community your profile is in. Every time you comment, post, or act, you get a link back to your profile within the community. The more you do this, the more Google sees your profile as an integral part of the site, and the more juice you'll get from your profile links.

Grey Hat - More Efficient

If you want to juice your profile a little faster, you can use sub directories and creative queries within Google, and act on pages that will pass the juice a lot quicker. For instance, something like this may work:

site:domain.com/groups/*/comments

This query may bring up the comment pages on the top groups in a social site. These are going to be ordered (approximately) from juiciest to duds. Commenting on this series of pages is going to juice your profile a lot quicker. However, you really aren't adding anything to the community. You're spamming and I'll let you wrestle with your own conscious about which tactic to deploy.

Light Grey - The Middle Way

The happy medium between these two methods involves the same creative queries using wildcards and subfolders, but with a more targeted and community oriented flavor. For instance try:

site:domain.com/groups/*/comments "online marketing"

This will bring up the most link friendly set that have something to do with a topic you know about. You'll be able to add something to the conversation instead of just saying, "Hey, cool site :) buy viagra.

I like this third method the best. It's more efficient than the pure white hat method of just commenting and acting randomly, and is less shady than the spam and jam nature of the grey hat method.