Are paid reviews gray/black hat?
-
Are sites like ReviewMe or PayPerPost white hat? Are follow links allowed within the post?
Should I use those aforementioned services, or cold contact high authority sites within my niche?
-
if you mark a payed review as paid for and put a nofollow on all links it is perfectly legit and white hat. Any changes to that make it "darker".
-
I wouldn't get too bogged down in the hat debate, the real issue when it comes to these things is would you feel comfortable discussing this with someone external to your business. Focus on relevance and promotional opportunities rather than a link alone.
In my opinion, it would be far better to contact the big sites in your market to see if paid reviews is something that they do.
Look at the way Michael does it over at GrayWolf (http://www.wolf-howl.com/sponsors/serpiq-interview/) he works with sponsors to produce top-notch content so that the 'paid link' doesn't feel quite so cheap.
Consider a bit of ego-bait first to get on side with the authority sites and bloggers just so your email or phonecall isn't so 'cold'.
Hope that helps.
-
Grey Hat I think.
-
Buying links is a No, No
But Matt Cutts has stated that paying for a review is ok. In fact a directory that charges for a review and does not accept just anyone is better.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Disappearing Links Black Hat ?
I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site. The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link. At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company. Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Is horizontal hashtag linking between 4 different information text pages with a canonical tag to the URL with no hashtag, a White Hat SEO practice?
Hey guys, I need help. hope it is a simple question : if I have horizontal 4 text pages which you move between through hashtag links, while staying on the same page in user experience, can I canonical tag the URL free of hashtags as the canonical page URL ? is this white hat acceptable practice? and will this help "Adding the Value", search queries, and therefore rank power to the canonical URL in this case? hoping for your answers. Best Regards, and thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Looking for a Way to Standardize Content for Thousands of Pages w/o Getting Duplicate Content Penalties
Hi All, I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :). So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages. So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically: "Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same. It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized. Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages. So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check. Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you! Pedram1 -
Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that- the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
New online store and use black hat to bring lots of sales
I have one online store and all the seo rules are follow to increase ranking and sales. Buying a new url a launching a new store ( to sale exactly the same products) is fast, easy and cheap. How about using black hat to this new store? I think I have nothing to loose. Is there something I should know before moving ahead? Launching a new store is very cheap and black hat can be done by one of those overseas company at low prices First thing, this new store should not link to my actual store I guess. Any advice? Thank you, BigBlaze
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Links via scraped / cloned content
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Mobile SEO best practices : Should my mobile website be located at m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile?
I'd like to know if there's any difference between using m.domain.com/pages or domain.com/mobile/pages for a mobile website? Which one is better? Why? Does Google treat the two differently? As you can see, I'm new to this! This is my first time working on a mobile website, so any links/resources would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GroupeDSI0 -
Turn grey myself or rat on black hat competitors?
When being trashed by a less than white competitor what do you find most effective: lie down with your feet in the air considering a career in gardening? turn grey yourself? rat on them to Google? Phil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Phil_1