Blogger Reviews w/ Links - Considered a Paid Link?
-
As part of my daily routine, I checked out inbound.org and stumbled upon an article about Grey Hat SEO techniques. One of the techniques mentioned was sending product to a blogger for review. My question is whether these types of links are really considered paid links. Why shouldn't an e-commerce company evangelize its product by sending to bloggers whose readership is the demographic the company is trying to target? In pre e-commerce marketing, it was very typical for a start-up company to send samples for review. Additionally, as far as flow of commerce is concerned, it makes sense for a product review to direct the reader to the company, whether by including a contact phone number, a mailing address, or in today's e-commerce world, a link to their website. I understand the gaming potential here (as with most SEO techniques, black-hat is usually an extreme implementation), but backlinks from honest product reviews shouldn't have a tinge of black, thus keeping it white-hat. Am I wrong here? Are these types of links really grey? Any help or insight is much appreciated!
-
As far as I'm concerned, gone are the days of requesting anchor text and, one step further, outright requesting links. Bloggers aren't living under a rock, they're hip to the SEO game. Requesting links in outreach emails is a bad tactic for several reasons, the main reason being it gives the blogger the impression that you could care less about what they actually think of the product and are only interested in the link. The 'ask' section of my blogger outreach emails therefore never include link requests.
-
When we get a review by giving our product to a reviewer and by extension link(s), I'm more interested in the leads that are going to be driven to us by the review, not increasing our search rank. Technically you're exchanging something with them, so they could be considered paid links, but honestly I wouldn't worry about it too much. This is a very common relationship between bloggers and companies. As long as the blog isn't spammy and is relevant to your product (like TommyTan says), it should be fine.
-
It can cut both ways, honestly. Look at paid links in general. If you buy a link from a site called "BuyMeSomeSEOLinks.com" that has "paid links" 50 times on the home-page with pricing, you're going to get caught. If you and I meet in a bar, and you agree to give me $50 for a link on my site, you'll never get caught, unless a Google employee happens to be sitting in the next booth. Now, I'm not condoning it either way, but I'm just being practical.
I think the key is a certain amount of subtlety. Google definitely, as a matter of policy, frowns on overt quid-pro-quo when it comes to links. If you send products to bloggers and actively solicit links (especially if you post that information online), you're at decent risk. If you send product to bloggers and make it easy for them to review those products but don't push the linking aspect too hard, it's a bit different, IMO.
Case in point - I recently had a weird situation where Amazon accidentally sent me a wireless headset. I thought it was a gift, only to realize they just screwed up a different order. I tweeted about the incident a few times, and then forgot about it. Two weeks later, the CEO of Headsets.com sent me brand new Sennheiser headset with a note that he saw my tweets. He didn't push me to promote it or ask for a link, etc. Of course, being a marketer, I did promote it on social media and told the story. To me, that's just smart marketing on their part. Of course, it's also a risk - I might've never reciprocated.
So, don't be too pushy - try to be creative, and make the experience fun for people. Make it something the bloggers want to talk about - not just a free product, but a unique and positive statement about your brand. That's win-win, IMO.
-
If your going to pay for links, I would just go to godaddy aucitons, find a site with a nice DA and PR and w/e other stats your looking for, put it up and place yourself a link on it. This is 100% cheaper, not only do you own it, but your also going to be able to keep it forever.
I find paid links a waste of money honestly unless your able to get on the front page of a real pr7 or higher. Or something very rare that you couldn't buy for cheap.
I see domains that are pr3 with 50 + DA all day long on godaddy auctions for $20 total after checkout price. I know, because I have bought many myself for projects.
You can find free templates or cheap templates as well all over online. Fiverr has people that will give you 150 + templates for websites that are actually nice for $5.00. You could pay someone on Fiverr $5.00 to setup the site for you and another $5.00 to have someone write the content for you. So you may have a total of $50 by the time your done. If you do it yourself, it's cheaper obviously.
Again this is only if your going to go this route, I wouldn't do this as a ethical tactic though, because it's not.
Have a nice day.
MB
-
Hi,
I don't believe paid links are bad and you shouldn't be worried about whether those link are considered as paid. However, why people believe paid links are bad is because paid links are usually low quality links that may harm your website. However, if that single "paid link" is from a high authoirty, non spammy website, then Search Engines will see the link as high authority. They won't know whether it is paid or not. I believe that is one of the myths about link building.
In your case, if you provice a sample to a blogger and they decide to write a review about your product and link to you, I believe it is ok and won't harm your ranking IF the blog is relevant to your theme and the blog is not a spammy blog and have some sort of authority.
What you should be worried about is not "buying" spammy and low quality links. Spammy and low quality is the keyword.
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
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
What to do with these toxic links?
Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us. We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days. So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them. Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly. Now, its happening again. 20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us. I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further? I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly. Here are some of the crappy links: http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.html They are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?0 -
Webiste Ranking Differently Based on IP/Data Center
I have a site which I thought was ranking well, however that doesn't seem to be the case. When I check the site from different IPs within the US it shows that the site is on page 1 and on other IPs it shows that it's on page 5 and for some keywords it shows it's not listed. This site was ranking well, before but I think google dropped it when I was giving putting in too much work with it (articles and press releases), but now it seems to have recovered when I check with my IP, but on other data centers it still shows it prior to recovering. It was able to recover after not building links to for a period of time, it showed it moved back up from the data center I'm connected to, but it still shows the possibly penalized results on other data centers. Is it possible that site is still penalized? So the question is why does it show it recovered in some data centers and not others? How do I fix this? It's been about 2 months since it's recovered from some data centers. Is this site still penalized or what's going on? There are no warnings in web master tools. Any insights would be appreciated! This isn't an issue with the rank tracking software, I've tested this on a multitude of IPs with varying differences. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozzy0 -
Competitors using unsavoury methods of link building. How to combat?
A lot of my competitors are using a lot of unsavoury/old-fashioned SEO methods to build links but are actually doing really well from it. A few different competitors are buying links in directories, using blogspam comments, forum posts, buying links in other places. The problem is, they all seem to be doing very well with it! What I've always been taught is that these methods are out and they could actually harm you - yet I haven't seen this happen to my competitors. Should I be using these spammy methods too or just concentrate on building quality content and high quality link building?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | charliedouglas1230 -
competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority
According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta” is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites 30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect. I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eranariel0 -
Unnatural Link Profile
Hi All, We are about to take on a new client whose site has been penalised for having a very unnatural link profile. They have over 1k links, which have 5 differing anchor texts, though the majority leans towards one particular phrase. Their previous SEO company had done this for them and the strategy worked, keeping them in the top 3 for most phrases, until Penguin. Now they reside in the 70-100 ranks. My initial though is we need to get rid of a lot of these links, however its going to be labour intensive and as we all know, labour is expensive. The website is nicely designed and has lots of great unique content. Its just the link profile letting it down. My question is; If this were your client, what would you recommend? A link removal program which could take a long time and be very expensive or would you recommend that they start again and build a new site, also expensive and time consuming. or would you suggest something different? If anyone knows of any Link removal people who have done a good job in the past I'd love to get some contact details. Thanks Aran
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chiefblob0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
Secretly back-linking from whitelabel product
Lets say a company (provider.com) offers a whitelabel solution which enables each client to have all of the content on their own domain (product.client.com), with no branding by the content provider. Now lets say that client.com is a site with a lot of authority, and to promote the launch of product.client.com, they put a lot of links from their main site to the subdomain. This can be very valuable link juice, and provider.com would like to be able to take advantage. The problem is, that client.com wouldn't like it if provider.com put in links on their whitelabel site. Suppose the following: All pages on product.client.com start to have a rel="canonical" link to themselves, with a get variable (e.g. product.client.com/page.htm -> product.client.com/page.html?show_extra_link=true) When the page is visited with the extra get parameter "show_extra_link" a link appears in the footer that points to provider.com My question is, would this have the same effect for provider.com as placing a link on the non-canonical version of the pages on the whitelabel site would?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoczar0