Contests For Link Building?
-
I have been seeing a trend that a lot of people are hosting contests with prices in the high end XXX $ or low end XXXX $ as the first price.
Usually it's arranged via a number of sponsors and you'd have to link to all the sponsors using the keywords given. Some people provide a text file with everything pre formatted to make it easy.
I have seen several sites paying 50$ to be part of a contest so that they can get some link juice from participating sites. Since the prize money is huge, many people will participate and will get lot of links.
There was a person who built an entire business out of this (Not naming him. He's still doing the same thing but with a small twist).
What's your take on such strategies? Don't you think it's high time Google caught these sort of "link schemes"?
-
I really don't think I should be pointing fingers here.
-
Can you provide a link to one of these contest? I am curious to see what exactly you mean. There are some legitimate contests that can build links and others that are probably gray or black hat.
-
Really its just another link ring scheme. Why a reputable company would want to get caught up in something like this is beyond me.
It sounds like the person making money on this is in the same grey area as the companies who would sign up for such a thing.
If you build unique, clean, informative, user-friendly content and do a little leg work yourself you'll never be tempted to even think about a scheme such as that.
-
I'm probably not adding a lot to the discussion, but this just seems like an all-around terrible idea.
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
-
Better link building is hardest to achieve in 2014
In a simple words. My site has good quality content not copies 100% original. Have good social points more then 500 or twitter, fb, g+ (200) and now what to do with ranking. should i start linking, but where, please don't refer me any-page. As my thinking all old link building method are now died, like comment, rss, classifieds, footer links, directories. etc At this time i am thinking the powerful link building is hard to achieve in whole process of seo. Now any one tell me where do i start, linking to my site .....? (I also research on competitors but there links are all from contextual and linking domain sites DA is more then 70, and i can't even able to get one link by scraping more then 200 sites.) Thanks .
Link Building | | seom20140 -
Best way to contact webmasters for link building
So I have my list of domains and contact information for link building. What is the best approach to contact webmasters to link build? Is there any standard way to ask them to add my link on their page? Does anyone have a generic boilerplate email?
Link Building | | BrandmanU1 -
Page Rank, Domain Rank, Link Building....Oh my!
Hi Everyone, So I am looking into a couple of sites that we can use for press release distribution. Naturally, I am looking for sites that will improve our SEO (sites that have a high domain authority). I guess I am just trying to wrap my head around the whole domain/page authority and how it effects our SEO. So for example, I am looking at prlog.org. They have an overall domain authority of 91...sweet! Is this all I should be looking at when I am looking to place a press release, which will include targeted links using appropriate anchor text? If I drill down even further to the actual section that the press release will live on, which will be the security section of the site, the page authority is a 49. Is this what I should be looking at? Do I have to drill down even further and look at the page rank for the actual URL that my press release will actually live on? I am assuming since it will be a totally new page that the page authority will be very low. Is this correct? Should I be looking at a combination of the two? The page authority of 49 is pretty low but the domain authority is very high. What does this mean for my SEO and my links? In a nutshell I need to know what I should be looking at for SEO purposes, is it domain authority, is it page authority of the section the site will live on or is it the actual page that my press release lives on. Is it a combination? What would you do in this situation? Also, could you give me a little more insight into when a low domain/page authority can actually hurt you. What the threshold where you get no link juice or are actually penalized? Do you have any insight in the domain/page domain number that is considered not worth it? Thanks all! Pat
Link Building | | PatBausemer0 -
When link building is returning little success, what is a good plan b?
I know that in an ideal world you would be able to create an amazing site with great content that every one would link to. But what if you're not able to so this, what if you the market you're in is very competitive and you're struggling to find good link partners. I know I can submit to directories and article/press sites but surely this isn't enough to get me any where near my desired goal! I guess I'm asking: is gaining reciprocal links the be and end all of Serps, am I missing any other SEO techniques to get my site higher up the rankings?
Link Building | | newdaymedia0 -
Link building options...slim
I am in a smaller town and sell real estate. I have seen a lot of the competitors links and some of them are just blog commenting spam and things like that (although they are ranking well for certain terms and their links are coming from sites that have nothing to do with real estate.) I guess what I am trying to say is should I start going after links from other towns/cities in my state or should I go outside of my state and start looking for other links in other cities and states? I have bought my townstate.com from someone recently and it ranks highly for town,state. I am trying to find different ways to get to number one for my "town, state real estate". What would you do? Would you continue to add content once a week or so as well as build links? Thanks!
Link Building | | blake-766240 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0 -
Our link building strategy - affiliates and trophies
Hey guys, I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure. We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways: We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
Link Building | | sichristie
The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
The trophies link to our partner pages.
So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website. So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change? Many thanks, Croozie0 -
Local Search Citation Building - 2 links on 1 page?
I have the opportunity to display information about a business on a handfull of high PR web pages (with relevant content, not directory listings). I'd like to use these listings to build local search citations and homepage authority/rank for chosen anchortext. The format allows name, address, phone number, email & url plus a description of the business (short paragraph that can contain a link) - see below. Should I link from the homepage url and body anchor text? Will search engines ignore the anchor text used in the 2nd link? Example Limited, 123 Example Road, London N12 3AA United Kingdom Tel: 020 712 3456 Email: ** hello@example.com** **Web: www.example.com ** A unique service offering special widgets to customers in the London area
Link Building | | Tman30