It's not link buying, but...
-
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow.
-
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.
-
You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website.
-
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.
-
You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll.
-
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.
-
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."
-
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
"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/
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid
-
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
-
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
-
-
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.
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
-
Is buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Why Google not disavow some bad links
I have submitted bad links that I want to disavow on google with the Moz Pro hight spam score. Its almost 4 months completed yet I have a bad link that exists with high spam score any solution? https://fortniteskinsgenerator.net/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marktravis0 -
Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion
Hello, I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content. I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry? Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach. But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome. Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing. Would love to hear your experiences either way. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW3 -
Should a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?
I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers. Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales. Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses. So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is a Link Wheel Safe If I Control the Wheel?
Hi, folks. Our company operates over 50 disease-specific, nice websites. Currently, we're building resource/landing pages for some therapies and other related topics. One experimental therapy is being investigated across four different disease types: cystic fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Hemophilia, and cancers. We have sites for all of them, and have created original landing pages for each site. Question: is it safe / does it make sense to "link wheel" these pages, especially since the wheel is composed of all our own sites? The other option of course is to simply interlink all of them, but will I get more visibility with a cyclical linking scheme? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Michael_Nace1 -
Can image links help improve my backlinking profile?
I recently spent some time looking at the backlink profile of a leading UK food & clothing retailer and noticed that a high number of their backlinks for very competitive search phrase's consisted entirely of image backlinks. 50% of the links contained no alt text and other 50% contained a mix of just the targeted keyword or a phase containig one mention of the targeted keyword. Has anyone had any experiance of this type of marketing producing any positive effect on SEO or search engine rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigJonOne0 -
Bad link backs out of my control
I have a big concern with my website. Recently I have been combing through the back links that I have been able to find associated with my web domain. Almost half of the links- 52 links- are from kinder-host. They are from what looks like could be valid sources, like babies-r-is.com/kinder-host.com or babies.kinder-host.com/page/6 etc. but they are junk. Some of these links are from articles I've written that are ripped off and placed on these websites along with my links. Some of the sites I can't even find the link but its there somewhere. Another 40 of the links are from attracta.com and although I can tell I have links on there to my website as well, I don't even see the link on the page and it is not related to my website. It's another junk site. So, I have bad link backs and no control over it. My understanding is this is potentially very harmful to my website! What can I do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JAGA0