It's not link buying, but...
-
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow.
-
You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months.
-
You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website.
-
One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki.
-
You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll.
-
You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website.
-
In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
-
-
as long as the link looks naturally possible to be there...id go with it. It's not like you are running a nationwide campaign of asking for positive reviews in exchange for flowers or gifts
-
I made the assumption that the chicken wings were free. If not, I agree that it would change things entirely, Mike. As for the review/link request, the question says: "... you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki."
On one hand, there's no mention of asking the review be positive, but I think that asking for a link, if the wings were free, is risky.
-
Here's the official Google page on Link Schemes: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
I differ with Sheldon on the "College Bar" one. Since you didn't state whether the chicken wings were free or not, I'm not sure if asking for the link would fall under "exchanging goods or services for links". If you stated "Reviews are optional but appreciated" and didn't ask for a link on their college wiki then I'd say its probably fine.
-
"You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bloggers-get-flowers-interflora-gets-slapped/60380/
-
I'm going to give two responses to each, one being what I suspect might be Google's take on it, the other which is my take.
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow.
-
You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. Google: paid; Me: paid
-
You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship
-
One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. Google: relationship; Me: relationship
-
You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid
-
You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship
-
In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon." Google: paid; Me: paid
Scary! Turns out I agree with Google on those... purely coincidence
-
-
All those scenarios look good to me. I think they are great ways to leverage offline relationships for online value. I would perhaps be careful with the last option but as long as you get a high quality, long term link I think it would be good.
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
-
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BBT-Digital0 -
I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?
I recently noticed a jump in my Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Upon further investigation I found hundreds of the most spammy web pages I've ever seen pointing to my domain (although all going to 404 errors): http://blurchelsanog1980.blog.com/ http://lenitsky.wordpress.com/ These are all created within the last week. A. What the hell is going on? B. Should I be very concerned? (because they are 404 errors) C. What should my next steps be? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Links and how they count?
We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name. Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for. My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
What do you say in your emails to horrible sites to remove your links?
Morning guys, I've the unenviable task of having to rectify poor link building (a previous company's work, not mine) which inevitably means emailing tons and tons of horrible directories with links to the client from as far back as 5/6 years ago. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat so it begs the question: What have you said to these types of sites that is effective in getting them to remove the links? This could even be a two/three-parter: If you've had little joy in requesting removals, have you dis-avowed the links, and what (if any) effect did it have? Thanks, M.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
How Do You Determine If A Link Is Quality?
What tools and signals do you use to determine if a link is quality or not? How can you tell if a link is going to hurt your ranking?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anchorwave0 -
Why are these sites so high with poor relevant links...
Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK0