Sounds too good to be true?

[Mulith]

Hi all,

Speaking to an SEO company at the moment about doing some link building for me but I just can't shake this suspicion that they are a bunch of cowboys.

My budget is £1000/month and they are promising 500-1000 high quality links/month. Common sense dictates that  surely that would trigger an unnatural link building pattern and at £1-2 /link doesn't sound like they are going to be quality.

Is there any scenario where these figures might  stack up. Personally I think it's bullshit but thought I'd check it out before telling him to piss off.

Thanx

[Nick_Ker]

The bullshit detector is showing a 95% likelihood of this being bullshit.

I agree with most of the others here who point out that they are probably doing forum/comment spam, and junk directories.

Finding a good SEO and link building service is going to be difficult if you focus only on the quantity of links. Like Thomas said, sometimes a handful of really good links is all you need. A good SEO company or consultant will be able to find those.  Instead of number of links, focus more on proven results. Ask for examples of results (not link counts, but traffic, keyword position, or conversion data) or references from clients who have been helped. THEN dig a little deeper and make sure they won't be doing things to get you in trouble.

[irvingw]

Run don't walk from that offer. They're going to spam on your behalf and probably get you penalized. Also, they could be talking sitewide numbers. One link in a blogroll on a blog with 50,000 pages is technically 50,000 links but Google discounts sitewide links.

If curious ask them to build 10 links for you on a trial and see what they come back with.

[Thos003]

There are many search terms that only require a handful of links to bump you to #1, so I wouldn't gawk at the 10 -15 links. 5 relevant in content links will do more than 10,000 crappy directory links.

[Mulith]

It's so tricky though because on one end of the spectrum you have companies promising the world and on the other end you have companies building 10 - 15 links / month for the same budget.

Is there a good resource somewhere to find a SEO business partner, that sort of insentivised approach is starting to appeal to me more than paying a company with nothing to lose?

[Wayne76]

mulith,

ask to see a listing of current and former clients. if they give you a name or two, do a quick backlink check on them. you should be able to discern a couple of things rather quickly:

1. if they don't provide a list, well, could be reason to be suspicious on its own merit.

2. if they provide a list and the backlinks are full of zero value directories, blog spam commenting, and other low-levle link schemes, you have your answer.

By and by, it sounds suspicious on the surface. I've learned one thing for sure, link building usually sucks, is tedious, completely un-sexy, and can be downright frsutrating. With that said, get out there and build some links!!!

Best of luck,

W

[Twilio]

Tell them to piss off. It's not just suspicious, these people are trying to sell you a time bomb.

They will not just fail to deliver. They will permanently tarnish your site's inbound link profile by smearing it with their flaming bullshit. 500-1000 high quality links/month is really, really hard to pull off. It basically requires regularly creating uber-viral content. Few can produce viral content to begin with, fewer still can do it consistently. Those that can certainly do not come cheap.

The best way to make the roaches scatter is to turn on the light. Tell them to show you the inbound link profiles (and subsequent ranking improvements) of their 5 most successful campaigns.

My guess is they will not respond at all. If they do, be prepared for more flaming bullshit.

[Mulith]

Yeah they did ask about target keywords and promised that they can get our site business4sale.co.uk to No.1 for "sell a business" in google uk  within 6 months.

Current number one has huge DA so was also a bit sceptical.

[ceesie]

Best thing you can do is insist in asking about the kind of webs where they will get those links. Sounds they will do things like forum profiles with a link (spammy), blog comments (spammy!) and more of that easy stuff which has less than zero quality or at the most a little bit more. If they are really serious about linkbuilding they will be asking about your keywords, former linkbuilding experience, linkable webcontent, etc.

[gfiorelli1]

Yes, that sound suspicious. Ask for details:

500 -1000 links from how many unique domains?

• 50 links from 1 domain means 100 domains...
• From what kind of site? From real third party sites or they use their own network of sites or blogs? There's a huge difference.
• Using what kind of tactics? comment marketing and forum? That could mean spam. Or from guest blogging, which could mean spinning in their blogs' network
• Doing outreach? Then the price is ridicoulus
• Directory submission? Probably they are very poor directories
• Social profiles? Them alone are not enough and many are no followed links

And ask for real examples, if they can give them. Or check out how the did link building for their own site.