India and Link Building

[Linwright]

A client of mine has decided to work all Link Building through an India team that she's used for a few years. The problem that I'm having with this situation is that the link building list below contains quite a few 0/10 PR websites, spam websites, and websites that have no direct relation to the client's industry. Am I wrong in thinking that link building should be done to high PR, authoritative sites that are related the the client's industry?

The link below will take you to the Google Doc that contains all links built for this client. I would love it if someone could take a look at that list and tell me what they think. Is this  recipe for disaster or great link building?

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4a0JOKKFu0SUFZRbFRBNUZJekE

Thank you so much!!!

[MarieHaynes]

This looks like exactly the type of link profile I am digging through all day long as I help webmasters deal with unnatural links penalties.  The sad thing is that sites I am seeing that have a link profile like this actually were ranking well on the merits of these crappy links!

I believe that we've only just started to see the wrath of Google in regards to unnatural backlink profiles like this.  Many sites have been hit with manual warnings and many by Penguin, but this is only the beginning.  Link profiles like this are bad news.

[CMC-SD]

This is definitely not 'great linkbuilding." It's spammy linkbuilding. Now, as the other commenters noted, spammy linkbuilding still works to some extent. The question is, how much is it working? Will it work at all by the end of the year? Given its limited benefit and the high likelihood that it will soon have no benefit whatsoever, is this the best use of your client's resources?

I'm a new in-house SEO at a company that has been doing something similar for years. It's still working, so we haven't stopped it yet. But I'm working on transitioning to the content-marketing model, so we'll survive the inevitable Penguin update that tanks it all. So educate your client about how outdated and spammy that kind of linkbuilding is, and make sure they understand that it's just a matter of time before it stops working. If they want to keep doing it for now, that's their choice. But they cannot afford to only do it. They also need to start a solid content-marketing plan ... and if they don't think they can execute a solid content-marketing plan, they need to think about shifting resources to other inbound marketing tactics like PPC.

[danatanseo]

Yes. It is a recipe for disaster. The problem is it's still working for some people, which is frustrating I know. You mentioned that she has been using this team for the past few years. What does the site have to show for it? My guess is that there's no proof that the site is benefiting from all these low level spammy links.

You need to find a way to show her proof that it's not helping. Has she been tracking her traffic and domain authority over time? Is there a correlation between those things and the link-building activities, either good or bad?

The other thing that I would do is show her an example of what happens to a site when all of that goes South. There are tons of examples of those.

If none of that works and you can't convince her that her business is too important to play games with, I'd maybe leave her to do the damage herself. You don't want that on your shoulders when you eventually move on to clients who do #RCS  [Real Company Stuff]

[NakulGoyal]

I agree. They look damn scary. You can tell by looking at the list, they look like directory sort of links. Yes, definitely not a good idea...might might work really really short term but will haunt long term.

Provide some examples of how Google sent the un-natural links warning to hundreds of thousands of website owners. Link building / Off-page is always a bit tricky and the best bet is to build great content and if one out of 10 pieces of excellent, well researched, well written content ends up being loved, you get a ton of good quality, natural links, that money can't buy and your competition won't be able to achieve...easily.

[JustDucky]

The links from low authority, unrelated sites are not likely to help much.  The anchor text (all keyword rich and targeting a couple of phrases) is scary.  Warn the client about the Penguin mauling you expect when the client reaches the tipping point.