Google Ad Planner for Link Ideas

Have Panda and Penguin shaken you up in regard to link building for your sites? While many affiliates did suffer devastating effects from the Google algorithm changes, and Google has changed the weighting on how they judge and value links, there is still tremendous SEO benefit to be had from building trusted and related links.

Going out to link farms and filling up comments on random non-related blogs could bring the hammer down, but a solid link from a content-related site still brings benefit. One of the best tools you can utilize to find solid content similar sites is provided by Google itself. Have you dipped into the Google Ad Planner yet? According to Google itself, the Ad Planner is:

DoubleClick Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

There's a wealth of information in the Ad Planner, but I want to focus on a method of finding related sites that you could approach and possibly gain links from that are related to your own content. The first thing you have to do is log into the Ad Planner). If you've never done this before, all it takes is a Google / Gmail ID.

One logged in, you'll see the green theme of the Google Doubleclick Ad Planner. You'll be in the research tab (which is exactly where you'll want to be). Don't be afraid to click around and get a feel and familiarity with this great tool. There's a wealth of traffic information for site, but I tend not to believe that in a literal sense. It's fairly good for relative traffic information, but as absolute I think Google under represents traffic. See the picture below:

What we're looking for are other domains you can approach for a link building campaign. The Ad Planner will provide a wealth of sites that have content similar to what you define (or even an audience as you define). Click on the "Search for Placements" tab under "Research" heading. Under this tab, you'll see 2 rows: Audience and Content. I prefer to focus on the Content row to define sites for links. There are several categories to make selections under: Site Language, Site Content, Topics, Exclude Topics and Target Sites.

In the picture below you'll see I've set language to English and I've entered several sites that I'd like similar sites for along with content keywords keywords.

With simply these few criteria defined, you'll get a significant list of domains/sites with related content to what is specified. You can further define your criteria and also add exclusions, targeted site domains (for example if you wanted UK specific domains you could target *.co.uk). Once you're happy with the list you've created, it's easy to export to Excel or CSV to begin plugging away at your outreach for link building. Check it out:

I hope you find this useful, and for other general and getting started affiliate marketing tips do check out our AMWSO Affiliate Marketing Help page. Also, if you have found this useful, please do throw us a Like via Facebook or a +1 via Google+ (widget below).