How do these people have so many external back links?

[NoahsDad]

A few of the sites that I 'compete' with have blogger accounts...and according to the research I've done they have over 500 million external, followed, links! These are mom blogs....and they aren't trying to do any SEO.

I've noticed that if you are using blogger (as opposed to wordpress) and adding embed youtube videos to your blog you can set it to auto populate to youtube and also get a link in return. From what I can gather this just happens with blogger accounts since bloggers...and youtube...and google are all related.  Does that have something to do with the crazy amount of followed external links they are getting?  They also have a domain authority of 96 (which is because blogger is a trusted domain....

Is the sub-domain a better number to look at since their blog is a sub domain on blogger?

Also, does anyone know who to get the same sort of exposure in youtube as blogger blogs get...or if it's even possible?

Thanks.

[AWCthreads]

Do you have a link or two you'd like to share for these outfits so others can do some snooping?

[RyanKent]

It is likely you are looking at the root domain's links. Instead, you want to look at the subdomain links.

For the most part, the primary domain's links are irrelevant. You only care about the subdomain's links. For example, if you site is noah.wordpress.com, the wordpress.com links do not benefit your site. Only the links to noah.wordpress.com are helpful.

It can be confusing but using wordpress.com as an example, you will see the root domain has 245 million links. If you are using the SEOmoz bar, right before you see the DA and total number of links notice it says "root domain". Use the drop down to change it to subdomain.