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
-
Regular links may still
Good day: I understand guest articles are a good way to pass linkjuice and some authors have a link to their website on the "Author Bio" section of the article. These links are usually regular links. However, I noticed that some of these sites (using wordpress) have several SEO plugins with the following settings: Nofollow: Tell search engines not to spider links on this webpage. My question is: If the setting above was activated, I would assume the author's website link would look like a regular link but some other code could still be present in the page (ex, header) that would prevent this regular link from being followed. Therefore, the guest writer would not experience any linkjuice. Any idea if there's a way of being able to see if this scenario is happening? What code would we look for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Audreythenurse0 -
Why should I reach out to webmasters before disavowing links?
Almost all the blogs, and Google themselves, tell us to reach out to webmasters and request the offending links be removed before using Google's Disavow tool. None of the blogs, nor Google, suggest why you "must" do this, it's time consuming and many webmasters don't care and don't act. Why is this a "required" thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RealSelf0 -
[linkbuilding] link partner page on webshop, is it working?
Hello Mozzers, I am wondering about the effect of link building by swapping links between websites and adding a link partner page to the web shop containing hundreds of links. I have this new competitor coming in to the SERP of Google competing on the keywords I am targeting. The competitor has way more links than our web shop. The competitor has a page with hundreds of links to other web shops witch on there turn has a link to there web shop. (not all off them link back btw) I always thought it is no use sharing links with other websites this way in creating a huge page with hundreds of links. it is of no benefit for neighter website to do this. Still it does seems to work (?) and tis strategy is used by a lot of web shops in the Netherlands. How are you guys looking at this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | auke1810
Witch of you guy's are using strategy like this?
Should I pick up this strategy myself?0 -
Is using Zeus's gateway feature to display contents from the different URL OK to do?
I've been writing a blog on free hosting blog platform and planning to migrate that under my domain name as directory. myblog.ABCD.com to www.mydomain.com/myblog now, I've learned that my Zeus server has a way to show myblog.ABCD.com at mydomain.com/myblog without transferring anything by using the Gateway feature. This will save a lot of time and hassle for me, but my question is if this is ok to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HypermediaSystems
Is there a chance that this could be considered a blackhat even though the content is mine? From the Zeus documentation:
"Gateway aliases enable users to request files from the new
web server, and receive them as if they were on the new server, when they are
still located on the legacy server. To the user, the files appear to be located on
the new server. " Thank you.0 -
Sitewide logo footer link - what's the risk?
Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link. The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site). I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Clear out Spammy Links
I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmandaJ0 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Why Does Massive Reciprocal Linking Still Work?
It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time. I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally. My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)? I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful? How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Gyi0