We all know that Link Building is one of the primary focuses in building a long-term web presence. Countless hours are spent, sometimes wasted, sifting through an unending wave of SERPs for those diamonds-in-the-rough, websites that are relevant to yours, and most importantly, are willing to link to you.
As the internet evolves, marketers have become more creative in how to acquire meaningful links. Reciprocal Links have been very successful for quite a long time now, and continue to be the most common forms of link requests I receive day after day.
In the past couple of months I’ve noticed an onslaught of paid link requests, companies that offer to pay me a sum of money if i’ll take existing text on my site and simply attach a link to sites of their choosing. For years i’ve been hearing how the prominent search engines try to weed out paid links because they may not reflect true relevancy, and could dilute SERPs. But, as I examine the links they want to pay for, I don’t see anything that would be considered irrelevant.
As near as I can tell, the only mark against my website would be too many external links (these paid links just being part of that), and possibly unaffiliated links that, while relevant, only serve to draw customers away from the site. If you’re okay with sending a small amount of visitors away from your website, and you’re confident that the links are relevant enough to not trip up any red flags, then there shouldn’t be a problem with accepting these links for money. If it’s relevant, right?
This all sounds fine and good, however, until you start to examine the companies that are soliciting these links:
Ground Up Advertising: Created 4.15.08
Web Matchers: Created 7.8.08
First Day Ads: Created 7.8.08
Grass Roots Advertising: Created 3.27.07
Inlinks to Grass Roots Advertising, the oldest of the four sites, reflect some contempt over the website. All of the other sites return errors, so at the very least I can assume there aren’t many links there either. Isn’t it a bit strange that these link building companies don’t seem the least bit concerned about their own inbound link building campaigns?
Due to the lack of creative design and relative ineptitude regarding general SEM for their own web presence, I have to wonder about the integrity or legitimacy of the sites that provide this already shady service. There are so few pages to each of the sites, and the content that does exist there serves as a vague reminder of the general overview. Thanks for the specifics, guys!
Now, onto the Employee Profiles. I appreciate, to an extent, the casual nature of the profiles but something struck me as odd about some of the images. Don’t they seem a bit generic? A couple of image searches brought up some interesting results. Stock photo’s!
I recently had a conversation with one of these attractive young women looking to pay me $150 to place a few simple links on my site, about five minutes worth of work. I questioned the legitimacy of the websites as well as the reputation and was left with the same impression.
If you break down what they’re asking you to do, and if you examine the links they want you to create, you’ll see that they’re not irrelevant and they really shouldn’t affect your site in an adverse way. Despite the fact that they’re paid links, they’re not designed to brute-force the search engine algorithms into ranking the site higher. They focus on relevance with the content of the link, but the motivation for the link is money.
Maybe I’m stubborn but I don’t want money to be a factor in determining which websites I want to associate myself with. These companies are probably not doing anything wrong, technically, but are you willing to risk the integrity of your site, OR are you willing to put in the research necessary to determine which link neighborhood you’ll be moving into by accepting these link bribes?