Are paid reviews gray/black hat?
-
Are sites like ReviewMe or PayPerPost white hat? Are follow links allowed within the post?
Should I use those aforementioned services, or cold contact high authority sites within my niche?
-
if you mark a payed review as paid for and put a nofollow on all links it is perfectly legit and white hat. Any changes to that make it "darker".
-
I wouldn't get too bogged down in the hat debate, the real issue when it comes to these things is would you feel comfortable discussing this with someone external to your business. Focus on relevance and promotional opportunities rather than a link alone.
In my opinion, it would be far better to contact the big sites in your market to see if paid reviews is something that they do.
Look at the way Michael does it over at GrayWolf (http://www.wolf-howl.com/sponsors/serpiq-interview/) he works with sponsors to produce top-notch content so that the 'paid link' doesn't feel quite so cheap.
Consider a bit of ego-bait first to get on side with the authority sites and bloggers just so your email or phonecall isn't so 'cold'.
Hope that helps.
-
Grey Hat I think.
-
Buying links is a No, No
But Matt Cutts has stated that paying for a review is ok. In fact a directory that charges for a review and does not accept just anyone is better.
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
PDF Sharing sites - scribd/dropbox/edocr/etc Cleaning Up SEO History
Howdy, Whilst in the process of cleaning up a new clients seo profile and have encountered a lot of techniques I am uncomfortable with and in my opinion should be removed. One technique I have not seen before is using a load of pdf sharing and video sites. The domains have high DA ratings, but to me the intention is highly questionable. The sites include: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tuxb8w1qowcm27i/Looking for boiler spares-geniune parts and consumables.pdf?dl=0 http://www.scribd.com/doc/241542076/Looking-for-Boiler-Spares-geniune-Parts-and-Consumables http://www.divshare.com/download/26207602-569 And so the list goes on for about 50 domains. Am I correct to be concerned here and what was the seo plan here? Thanks in advance. Andy Southall. (Marz Ventures)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Do you choose PA/DA over PR when purchasing expiring domains?
Hey guys, So a lot has been said about private blog network. I have but only 1 question: Do you choose PA/DA over PR when purchasing expiring domains or PR is most critical? Thanks a lot!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nicenike0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
LOCAL SEO / Ranking for the difficult 'service areas' outside of the primary location?
It's generally not too hard to rank in Google Places and organically for your primary location. However if you are a service area business looking to rank for neighboring cities or service areas, Google makes this much tougher. Andrew Shotland mentions the obvious and not so obvious options: Service Area pages ranking organically, getting a real/virtual address, boost geo signals, and using zip codes instead of service area circle. But I am wondering if anyone had success with other methods? Maybe you have used geo-tagging in a creative way? This is a hurdle that many local business are struggling with and any experience or thoughts will be much appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vmialik1 -
New online store and use black hat to bring lots of sales
I have one online store and all the seo rules are follow to increase ranking and sales. Buying a new url a launching a new store ( to sale exactly the same products) is fast, easy and cheap. How about using black hat to this new store? I think I have nothing to loose. Is there something I should know before moving ahead? Launching a new store is very cheap and black hat can be done by one of those overseas company at low prices First thing, this new store should not link to my actual store I guess. Any advice? Thank you, BigBlaze
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
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