Soliciting Product Reviews with Free Samples?
-
I have been looking at my competitors links and I have discovered that a competitor with top positions in the SERPs has been gaining links by offering free product samples to bloggers in exchange for links within the review back to their site.
My question is, does Google frown on this? Can it invoke a penalty? To me it seems tantamount to buying links, but yet his results speak for themselves. It is something I intend to start doing myself if I am sure it won't result in a penalty.
Thanks.
-
Hi,
Whether you report this or not is up to you - there's always been a lot of debate in SEO circles about whether it's a good idea to do this or not but the end of the story is pretty much that it's up to you.
The technical answer to the question is that yes, soliciting links with products is directly frowned upon. Plenty of people still basically do this but in a more subtle manner, where they are "developing a relationship" first, often not directly asking for a link. Products for publicity is an ancient trick which Google won't get rid of, but they definitely can and do say that they aren't happy with a direct exchange.
-
<this is="" a="" rant="" from="" blogger="" who="" gets="" solicited="" lot....="" maybe="" there="" nugget="" here="" to="" help="" you="" understand="" what="" some="" bloggers="" might="" think="" about="" these="" solicitations=""></this>
I have people wanting to send me free stuff to write a review for them.
They must think that I have nothing on the schedule here. Most bloggers who have any audience at all have a lot more interesting stuff to write about instead of your product. The things that I write about instead of your product are probably going to make me a lot more money. They are the topics that my readers want to hear about.
The largest group are people who want to send me a cheap product, expect me to try it and then shill it to the people who visit my site and subscribe to my feed. I am not going to be your mule. Honestly, if I filled my feed with a bunch of product reviews all of my visitors will stop visiting and all of my subscribers will unsubscribe.
Shilling your product is dangerous to my success.
So, I am not going to write about your product. If you want to reach my readers just buy adsense that is site targeted at my domain or ask about how much it costs to have the rectangle ad on the right side of all of my articles. It is going to cost a lot more than the product sample that you thought you would send me.
Any blogger who has a worthwhile audience is not going to write an article for your product sample. He isn't. The economics are not there. He is going to spend his time writing about the stuff that brings visitors to his site. Blathering about your product is not going to go down well with his visitors. He would be burning their patience.
Most bloggers with a worthwhile audience are just going to tell you.... Here are our advertising rates. You can have the rectangle on the right side of all of our article pages for $15,000 per month.
-
Agreed.
-
I find this one of google's many extremely vague guidelines that sounds clear, but in reality, is not at all. You can't exchange "a free product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link." Which, to me sounds like, "you can't give someone a sample and they agree to write about it and link to you." That parts clear. What's not clear, is whether or not you can send a blogger a free product, and hope they write about/link to it. If I had to argue it, I'd say you definitely can or google would have written differently to include the latter specifically.
Lots of bloggers are known for their reviews. It seems natural that they get sent products, especially new releases and review them in their blogs. If they only went out and reviewed the products they bought themselves, they probably wouldn't have a whole lot of content. So, sending them free products should be completely fine. The problem stems from what comes next.
1. How did you "discover" your competitor was doing this? (that's rhetorical) I just want to think about if how you discovered it and if it was something Google could discover itself. If it is, you definitely shouldn't do it.
2. Have you tried just sending out free samples to bloggers? If you're doing this primarily for SERPs, and not for the bloggers' fan base, then you don't need him/her to review 50 products to get you 50 links. Really, the first one (or few) are what provide you most of the SEO benefit. If you send someone twenty five free samples (with no strings attached), they probably will write about at least one (though, to be fair, I can't say for certain that's true). Also, you can look through the comments on the blogger's site, and find someone mentioning your product or something like your product, and then you could send your free sample with a screenshot of the comment. This would show that the blogger's community wants to know about your product, and you did some research.
3. If you're still going to do some sort of 'review my product for links" official deal, then I'd at least over send the blogger products and keep records of it. Maybe, if you get flagged by google, but you show only 4% of the products you sent out ever got reviewed, they might believe you were sending out samples legitimately...but I doubt it.
Good luck!
Ruben
-
I guess that would be your decision. I have in some instances reported violations, although they were not always heeded. If you wish to report them then here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1 is the best place to do so.
-
This begs the question, should i report my competitor who has achieved terrific results with this method?
-
Taken from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
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
-
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
Duplicate Content Product Descriptions - Technical List Supplier Gave Us
Hello, Our supplier gives us a small paragraph and a list of technical features for our product descriptions. My concern is duplicate content. Here's what my current plan is: 1. To write as much unique content (rewriting the paragraph and adding to it) as there is words in the technical description list. Half unique content half duplicate content. 2. To reword the technical descriptions (though this is not always possible) 3. To have a custom H1, Title tag and meta description My question is, is the list of technical specifications going to create a duplicate content issue, i.e. how much unique content has to be on the page for the list that is the same across the internet does not hurt us? Or do we need to rewrite every technical list? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
[SEO] Star Ratings -> Review -> Category Page
Hello there, Basically, if you put non-natural star ratings on the category page, like in the attached images, you will get manual ban from google right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shanaki
(i know it for sure, cause I had clients with this situation) The real question is:
If I put a form that allows users to write a review about the category products on the category page, for REAL, will google still ban? Any advice? Any example? With respect,
Andrei Irh0O kto4o0 -
How do I get more video reviews on a new site?
Hi, I'm working on a site that has video reviews of various places. It's general information/experience that most people possess and production-wise they are selfies. These videos are then transcribed and, voila... searchable content. My problem is this... how do I get large numbers of people to go to the trouble to make a 2 minute selfie? I thought about HARO, since one could work in a plug for something, but they have a site traffic threshold that this new site isn't at. Any and all ideas on how to efficiently generate this content for a new site with very little traffic would be appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Check For Bad Directory Backlinks For Free
I used http://deletebacklinks.com/ yesterday to search 7 of the directories they have access to for searching bad links. I found one of my sites had links on these directories and I was able to remove them for fairly reasonable price. Thought this is a good tool to do a free quick check for any bad linkbacks on deindexed directories. I know this may be a small portion but every little bit helps.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheSEODR0 -
Product Reviews – Link Building Strategy
I own Simply Bags and have been sending sample bags to bloggers as a link building strategy. The following four links are a sample of recent product reviews. http://bit.ly/Mk6Z1t http://bit.ly/Mk6Smq http://bit.ly/Mk7atN http://bit.ly/Mk7wR8 Product reviews were considered a good link building strategy. After Panda & Penguin is Product Reviews still a good strategy? Please comment on the quality of the four sample links. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b4tv
Bob Shirilla0 -
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