Your typical blog disclosure. "We received a free product but are not financially compensated".
-
Good afternoon & Happy Friday!
I've ran into the following disclosure multiple times on different blogs. It seems to me like it would be a red flag and counter productive for both the blogger and the brand sending the samples as "free samples" are subject to google link scheming.
Am I correct? What are your thoughts on bloggers using this disclaimer in regards to SEO?
Disclosure: Some of these products were samples provided to me to try. Opinions and the choice to review are 100% my own! I was not financially compensated for writing this blog post. This post contains affiliate links.
-
Steve,
Thank you for sharing this.
-
I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.
The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.
The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.
-
Amazon actually gives products to their top reviewers. Via Amazon Vine. Trick is un-biased good reviews gets you good stuff! Moz actually gives rewards too, but its actually for helping others. You could say a review kinda...helps others ya?
-
Hi
Free samples are a bit of a grey area, and in my opinion it depends on who is sending out the product and what they really want from it.
We send out quite a few products to be reviewed and we actually want them reviewing to find out what people think of them and to drive sales (if it gets a positive review). I like a link and only for the reason its easier for the customer to purchase the item, but whether that link is follow / no follow / affiliate - i don't really care. Its all about the review to build awareness of the fact we sell the products and sometimes to show the diversity of the products we sell, especially new categories.
Where it becomes and issue is when the person sending out the reviews start demanding followed links to certain parts of the sites, thee don't look natural and the only reason they are sending out the products are for SEO benefit.
Regarding your disclaimer, as someone who has sent out products I wouldn't have a problem with you putting that on there, and there was something earlier this month about vlogging now having to make it clear when they have been given free products to review.
I guess SEO isn't as White Hat and Black Hat as some claim, as this to me would be 'Grey Hat'. Plus review sites need to get there products from somewhere to review and these sites do add a lot of value to customers in the decision process of buying so I couldn't ever see Google penalising sites for either accepting review samples or sending them out - whether or not in the future the might a 'review follow' as well as 'follow and no follow' I don't know. This could be one way for the search engines to see that while the links haven't technically been paid for but are not 100% natural.
Great article here for aditonal reading on this: moz.com/community/q/soliciting-product-reviews-with-free-samples
Thanks
Andy
-
Hey,
In my experience and opinion, it doesn't reflect a linking scheme. This is a pretty common practice in both the online and offline marketing world, the disclosure is used to separate an actual review from a paid promotion.
I have never have had negative SEO results from using a disclaimer.
Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps.
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
-
Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
My least favorite part of SEO 😉 I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https. The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/ New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/ This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https. Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use? Thank you Moz community! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?
I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask. Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Is there a way to stop my product pages with the "show all" catagory/attribute from duplicating content?
If there were less pages with the "show all" attribute it would be a simple fix by adding the canonical URL tag. But seeing that there are about 1,000 of them I was wondering if their was a broader fix that I could apply.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cscoville0 -
"nocontent" class use for Google Custom Search: SEO Ramifications?
Hi all, Have a client that uses Google Custom Search tool which is crawling, indexing and returning millions of irrelevant results for keywords that are on every page of the site. IT/Web dev. team is considering adding a class attribute to prohibit Google Custom Search from indexing bolierplate content regions. Here's the link to Google's custom search help page: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2364585 "...If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine. (We'll still follow and crawl any links contained in the text marked nocontent.) To use the nocontent class attribute, include the boilerplate content in a tag (for example, span or div) like this: Google Custom Search also notes:"Using nocontent won't impact your site's performance in Google Web Search, or our crawling of your site, in any way. We'll continue to follow any links in tagged content; we just won't use keywords to calculate ranking for your Custom Search engine."Just want to confirm if anyone can forsee any SEO implications the use of this div could create? Anyone have experience with this?Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MRM-McCANN0 -
Guest Blogging Funny Problem!
Well it made me laugh and then cry a little after anyway. I have a keyword which is ranking page 1 position 7, I created a really nice article with content relevant to the keyword maybe around 600 words. I spent maybe half hour researching blogs on myblogguest looking for one that was based in the same country, had really good mozbar stats, even checked out how quickly other posts got indexed. I put 2 anchor text links in the article and managed to get the blogger to post the article. Next day checked the rankings and the post on the blog is now position 7, and has knocked me to position 8. I'm tempted to ask the blogger to change the title tag not to include my targeted keyword. Anyone got an advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Meta Description In Blog Feed
The SEOmoz crawl tool is giving me a lot of crawl errors because my blog feed and my blog tags do not have meta descriptions. Can you even give this type of content meta descriptions? If so how can you do it, as this content is created dynamically by Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0