Blog farm?

[vital_hike]

One of our clients has recently been approached by a competitor regarding a Link building service and SEO and as part of this they have supplied example sites that they "contact" to post articles that contain a link or links back to our client site. When we researched these sites we found that the sites did in fact have a good Domain Authority but the content was extremley dubious and the links were often forced into the articles in unnatural context. We also found that the Author page of these sites often had a similar URLs but the display names were changed. On the face of it these article sites look like a good idea and to an untrained eye they could appear good value. In fact they could be passing good value and may in fact work. I have found around 150 sites that i think share simialr traits but i gave up and I am sure there are many more.

My opinion is that this looks like a large farm of blogs that are utilising similar templates and author set up. I am just looking for any experience/thoughts on how to look at this. My feeling is that i dont want to be in anyway recommending this as a service yet my client may think that this is good value. Any experiences shared would be great.

thanks in advance for any comments.

[EGOL]

Yep, they are not patient.

They need to consider that they are arriving at the battle 5, 10, 15 or 20 years late.  Existing websites have been working all of that time and Google will not push them aside in favor of a noob who has invested very little in comparison.

If they want to see results they need to invest enough to become competitive.   It's no different than me deciding that I am going to challenge Anthony Joshua and expect to step into the ring with him after three months of work.

[vital_hike]

Yeah...I agree. It is sad that people feel the need to contribute in this manner. It really doesnt help anyone in the long term. Good quality content (and the reputation to go with it) is always the way forward but can often be a longer game and people are not very patient.

[EGOL]

If all it takes is for you to "submit an article" to get something published then those sites are going to fill up with crap in a hurry.  After they fill up with crap their links will become poison and you will have an unnatural links problem.

We have sites with a lot of content and people are constantly writing to "get an article published".  At first we received so much absolute crap that a lot of time was wasted.  It didn't slow down until we started requiring an resume that clearly shows significant education and/or experience related to the submitted content, links to previously published content, and a face slapping bullet point that we don't accept  linkbuilder content.

Now we don't get a lot of content offers but what is offered is mostly from educated and experienced people who simply want to get a message out and obtaining a link to their website is not a consideration.   Still a few linkbuilder types will try to fake or argue or weasel their way in.   These are much easier to reject than the ones that we get from certified crackpots who submit high quality authorship that is too far on the fringe of our topics. 

[vital_hike]

Thanks for your response. I suppose this is a common issue. It is much easier to sell a magical quick fix instead of long term vision. Unfortunatley uneducated people desire that short term, minimal effort apporach and dont care until they find out it doesnt work or makes things worse. This is especially true when sold to them by an uneducated sales person (usually following a script)

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

The best advice I can give here is if it doesn't feel natural or right, then it's more than likely not. Advise your client the best you can and arm yourself with as much information about the sites / the possible repercussions of taking this route as possible. At the end of the day, your job is to guide your client as best as you can and let them make an educated decision.

Last note, based on experience, Google hates link farms / link schemes. If these pages / sites have the scent of that, I'd steer clear.

Hope this helps, good luck!
P