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
-
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Links Identified in WMT not on Webpages
Hi, We're currently reviewing one of our clients backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic & OSE as we can see many toxic links. However we cannot find the links on the webpages that are listed on Google WMT. We have searched through the website along with checking through the source code. Should we still disavow the domain? Thanks, Edd
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Best Link Building Strategies in Modern SEO
Hello, In light of all the updates and also in guest blogging being only for nofollow links now, what's some of the best strategies for link building for ecommerce sites? We're in an industry where the content doesn't get linked to very much. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
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 -
Getting Back Links When I Cannot Add Outbound Links to My Site
I have a collection of websites that I do not control in terms of content or page creation/editing. As a result, I have no way to add links to outside sites on any existing or new pages. Given this, how can I go about finding and requesting other sites link back to our sites/pages if I cannot offer them a link to their site in return? I know that content is a link driver, but I do not control the content, so I cannot develop new content to help drive links. I appreciate any help/advice any experts can provide.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
White hat link technique to banned domain
The question is: I have branddomain A (manually penalization by google, one year ago and after 4 consideration requests and more than 3/4 of links removed, stills banned) authority 42 And and new branddomain B (with fresh content created after penalization in the case of no recovery as it happen) authority 26 There are no links from A to B, both are now with same traffic but i want people that find me on domain A (partial penalized) to come to my new web brand. Both domains have same name, different extensión. So the question: Can i link with photo domain A to domain B, if i place nofollow and no ancor text on those linked photos. I want to have my traffic unified and i dont want to go against google guidelines
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
I've done some link building on my website... why is google showing this?
Hi guys, it seems Google is going crazy as always, basically sometimes i'm ranked first page sometimes i'm not there, not sure if it's because of my link building and Google is indexing the links. At the moment in IE i'm top 3-4 for this keyword however the Title tag is not what I set it to be it's basically taking the product name then adding something after it. (I know google sometimes changes to what they want if they feel its more relevant but it isn't in this case) Not sure if this is normal for my keyword to keep appearing then dissapearing in Google. I noticed in FF my keyword isn't there but in IE it is. I've logged out of my Google account deleted all history/cookies etc. Even checked on my friends computer. Hope this makes sense and i'm not going crazy!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast0