Exploring Craigslist for Link Building

I started to notice the increase in popularity for Craigslist in the past few months. I began to wonder what is the secret of this simple site?  Is it possible to leverage it for building links to your site?

I began testing this with creating a couple of ads, and posting them on Craigslist.

Craigslist Singapore

First of all, a few things to note before you post on Craigslist:

1. You can’t post the same ad in multiple places. Craigslist is smart enough to detect it.
2. It does allow you to post your hyperlinked code into the ad text, so you can use HTML
3. The ad, once posted, is only supposed to be live for the next 45 days.

So what happens after 45 days? Will the ad disappear? I sure don’t know, and would like to know your ideas and opinion on this.

But atleast I prayed to God that Google comes to read the link before the 45 days expire, so that it gets me an incoming link. Lo and Behold. I am really surprised. In less than 24 hours, Google has sent me an alert ( I hope you know how to use Google Alerts) of my ad post listing on Craigslist.

While there, I notices some interesting ads for Buying properties in Singapore from Chesney Real Estate, and Stone Forest IT, which is one of the largest IT outsourcing Company in Singapore. So I guess people are beginning to use and exploit this technique for link building.

Then I googled, and saw Dosh Dosh giving advice on How to Make Money Online using Online Classified Ad Portals like Craigslist, which was quite good, and I picked up a couple of ideas from here.

Your thoughts? Please share it here.

Cheers,
Vinai

Tags: craigslist, Link Building