This is just a very short post about my very first first-hand experience with the power of a backlink – a backlink from a high PR site.

You see, I’ve got this website of mine which I think I have mentioned in a previous post – the Brainwave-Entrainment site. It normally gets only 1 or 2, views a day, sometimes none at all, this site being very small with only a few pages in it. This site is the very first one I’ve formally set up as a hobby. I set it up in a free hosting company called 000webhost.com. I decided to create this site as a practice site as I have just began to learn how wonderful it is to create website pages using PHP, thanks to its very generous makers for giving it free.

So, long story short, imagine my surprise when one day, I checked the stats and found that there were around 167 people on my site yesterday! Remember I have gotten used to 1 or 2! So, naturally I got curious and went hunting for the ‘culprit’ who caused all this ‘chaos’. The tuaw.com site – some sort of unofficial Apple website! Turns out that one of their writers have linked my website to a keyword (‘isochronic tones’) he used in his article. I still can’t imagine how he got a hold of my url because out of tens of thousands of sites related to ‘isochronic tones’, he found one very obscure site and chose for a link in his article. From google’s page rank checker, I got another surprise of my life. Tuaw.com is PR 8!!!

So you see, what I’ve read in seo websites about quality backlinks turned out to be amazingly true, at least for me. The thing about this is that it took absolutely no effort on my part to get that one big backlink. Just plain old miracle.

Thus, lesson 1: Quality backlinks work bigtime!

The downside about this is that I’ve learned another lesson in website building. Remember that my website if hosted free by 000webhost.com? And the name is brainwave-entrainment.net63.net. Meaning, the domain name is not my own! The backlink power gained by the website is regretfully not mine to keep. Imagine if 000webhost should go bankrupt tomorrow, or just simply pulls out my website without any reason at all. I’d end with nothing.

Thus, lesson 2: Get your own domain name!

Now, go!

BTW, let me take this opportunity to thank Victor Agreda, Jr., the tuaw.com author who wrote that article, A fistful of apps: WideNoise, Labyrinth 3D, Penalized, Pure Sleep, Army Knife, which contained the link to my site.