Your typical blog disclosure. "We received a free product but are not financially compensated".

[90miLLA]

Good afternoon & Happy Friday!

I've ran into the following disclosure multiple times on different blogs. It seems to me like it would be a red flag and counter productive for both the blogger and the brand sending the samples as "free samples" are subject to google link scheming.

Am I correct? What are your thoughts on bloggers using this disclaimer in regards to SEO?

Disclosure: Some of these products were samples provided to me to try. Opinions and the choice to review are 100% my own! I was not financially compensated for writing this blog post. This post contains affiliate links.

[90miLLA]

Steve,

Thank you for sharing this.

[stevefidelity]

I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.

The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.

The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.

[donford]

Amazon actually gives products to their top reviewers. Via Amazon Vine. Trick is un-biased good reviews gets you good stuff! Moz actually gives rewards too, but its actually for helping others. You could say a review kinda...helps others ya?

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Free samples are a bit of a grey area, and in my opinion it depends on who is sending out the product and what they really want from it.

We send out quite a few products to be reviewed and we actually want them reviewing to find out what people think of them and to drive sales (if it gets a positive review). I like a link and only for the reason its easier for the customer to purchase the item, but whether that link is follow / no follow / affiliate - i don't really care. Its all about the review to build awareness of the fact we sell the products and sometimes to show the diversity of the products we sell, especially new categories.

Where it becomes and issue is when the person sending out the reviews start demanding followed links to certain parts of the sites, thee don't look natural and the only reason they are sending out the products are for SEO benefit.

Regarding your disclaimer, as someone who has sent out products I wouldn't have a problem with you putting that on there, and there was something earlier this month about vlogging now having to make it clear when they have been given free products to review.

I guess SEO isn't as White Hat and Black Hat as some claim, as this to me would be 'Grey Hat'. Plus review sites need to get there products from somewhere to review and these sites do add a lot of value to customers in the decision process of buying so I couldn't ever see Google penalising sites for either accepting review samples or sending them out - whether or not in the future the might a  'review follow' as well as 'follow and no follow' I don't know. This could be one way for the search engines to see that while the links haven't technically been paid for but are not 100% natural.

Great article here for aditonal reading on this: moz.com/community/q/soliciting-product-reviews-with-free-samples 

Thanks

Andy

[masonrj]

Hey,

In my experience and opinion, it doesn't reflect a linking scheme. This is a pretty common practice in both the online and offline marketing world, the disclosure is used to separate an actual review from a paid promotion.

I have never have had negative SEO results from using a disclaimer.

Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps.