Ask Bloggers/Users To Link To Website

[marcuslind]

I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains.

Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service.

This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP.

Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions.

Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?

[Everett]

If you are asking them to write about you and give their honest impression of your product/service you are marketing.

If you are asking them to write about you AND asking for a followable links you are violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

What you are doing is clearly walking the line between these, but my opinion without having actually seen any of the posts/links is that you are leaning toward the marketing side.

Where you might run into trouble is if this tactic represents a huge proportion (say about half or more) of your total links. Relying to heavily on any one link building strategy, especially "iffy" ones like this, is never a good idea. Round out your link profile. If you need to pause this campaign while you do so then so-be-it.

[Robert_G]

In my opinion you shouldn't worry too much about those links, although it is very simple to turn white hat: ask those bloggers to apply a rel=nofollow link attribute. As you know, Google is against every manipulative link building technique.

A few years ago Pay per Post type link building techniques were in vogue. You know what happened to them, I suppose.

I don't think Google can tell for sure if someone paid for a post if that certain post is published on a  high quality blog. Let's say you know an editor from a certain newspaper, you give him $500 and he'll mention your website in one of his articles? Did you paid for that link? Yes. Can Google determine if that certain link is a paid one? I don't think so.

You should think that Google's algo it's all mathematics, it's all "if" - "than" causal programming.

So, if several spammy bloggers, that write mostly about products, services, giveaways link to you... that is not good and I'd avoid that. Unfortunately, the most starters will do anything for $5-$10 and, to some extent, it's understandable, because they have no revenue.

Also, many bloggers have that Disclosure Policy page, I'd avoid them all, or ask them to use nofollow.

If there are bloggers that own high quality websites, which ain't filled with reviews, maybe I'd pay for a natural looking mentions (can be your plain URL, words like "this website", etc.) but I wouldn't rely 100% on this.

Using nofollow will still deliver you traffic and getting traffic and high quality content maximizes the natural linking probability.

Hope it helps,