How valuable are IBLs from Myspace in regards to SEO?

[tuler]

With a very new site (launched August 1st) Myspace is a great place to spread the word about my site. Mostly because it is so easy to find your target market if it exists on Myspace.

One of the methods that I've used to help spread the word about the site is to entice other myspace users to place banners or text links on their profiles that link back to my site. I've been fortunate that this method has worked very well, thus providing me several IBLs from Myspace.

Though, how valuable are all of these links from Myspace? Do the search engines recognize this as multiple people linking back to my from their "sites?" Or, do they see it as multiple links from one site? Does this hurt me in the eyes of Google and such if I get a large amount of IBLs from Myspace very rapidly? Do they consider this link spam though it's not me that's placing the links?

I've noticed with Yahoo and MSN that they see some value in the Myspace links and will display several (over 50) when I do a search for link:http://www.mydomain.com.

Though, with Google I don't see this at all. Not one link from Myspace.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Web-Weaver]

One of the methods that I've used to help spread the word about the site is to entice other myspace users to place banners or text links on their profiles that link back to my site. I've been fortunate that this method has worked very well, thus providing me several IBLs from Myspace.

If you want to increase your IBLs try posting an image with a hyperlink in the comments sections of each of your "friends". That way you don't have to entice anyone to do anything...just leave a nice image (logo or product perhaps) for each and every one of them and you automatically have as many IBLs as you have friends.

[tuler]

If you want to increase your IBLs try posting an image with a hyperlink in the comments sections of each of your "friends".

Thanks for the suggestion. I do quite a bit of that also, but I've been getting close to 50 friends a day, so it's very time consuming to do that with over a thousand friends. If I do that, I usually choose a "friend" that has a lot of exposure.

[Steven1976a]

Its an interesting topic which I have thought about by myself but like yourself Im afraid it will be classed as link spamming and even if it is not now, i think it will be in the future. As pointed out you get 50 new friends a day or 1500 a month just by posting on myspace. To me these will generally be links from non relevant sites to your own site therefore it may be classed as spam but at the same time surely you cant be classed as spamming just by advertising?

Ill be interested to read other peoples views because im sure there is money to be made through the networks created in myspace

[incrediblehelp]

Good question, but have you ever seen any MySpace website ranking very high in Google?

[T2DMan]

The issue with myspace is that the url's are so convoluted (apart from the myspace.com/handle), and that the friends pages that you are getting links from are not likely to have much Google PR themselves, if they happen to be cached.

I see the opportunity being that myspace is an authoritive domain, and you now have a url on that domain. If you give enough of your non myspace links to it, I see your page getting high in its own right - so long as you are better than any other page seo'ed for that search phrase.

Then any links you have from mypace to your own site should increase your own sites ranking.

Myspace should be good in its own right as a method of getting human traffic, if your target audience are the sort of people using myspace.

Matt Cutts has mentioned how edu and gov sites are just normal sites in Google's eyes. Same rules. They happen to get lots of links from other important sites, and that is what any site can get. So I struggle to see that myspace should be any different, or have specific Google rules applied to it.

It is interesting doing the experimentation.

[lasgas]

Yes for the keywords "marketing company" I seen one myspace for a marketing company rank in the top ten
I forget but it's in 8 or 9.

[CLBridges]

I handle a couple of art sites and members of myspace, as well as many other 'online communities' hotlink to our images. Unfortunately, very few of them provide IBL's to the artist's site they're infringing upon. Of the few that do, a couple of them have managed to show up once in a while when I search for link:http://www.mydomain.com.

I've never really noticed any ranking difference when they were showing up opposed to not showing up.

But T2Dman is right about online communities being able to increase your traffic. After adding a watermark of the domain name to all the 'art' images, there was a ten-fold increase in traffic to every site.. all of it from myspace.

Carrie**

[T2DMan]

Well, "Myspace seo" is a rather relevant phrase for Myspace to rank for, and it is. And my www.Coreseo.com site ranks there as well ;)

Amazing what a little onpage seo does for a site..

[incrediblehelp]

Yes for the keywords "marketing company" I seen one myspace for a marketing company rank in the top ten
I forget but it's in 8 or 9.

Dont see it anywhere here.