It's not link buying, but...
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Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow.
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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.
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You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website.
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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.
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You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll.
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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.
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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."
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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
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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.
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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.
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"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/
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid
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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
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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
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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.
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