Is this proposal white hat or likely to harm me in the long run?
-
Hi,
I'm considering outsourcing some SEO to a company I got a first month trial sweetener deal with. I've not done this before and am a little unsure about what they propose doing, not sure if I'm being a bit paranoid or too controlly.
Details of what they propose:
Send them 10 keywords we're interested in ranking for.
Work they will perform:
-Submit site to all major search engines
-Submit 20 social book marks for site
We'll produce 1 article + 19 spun variations of the article submitted to:
-30 directory sites
-10 press release sites and distribution networksBusiness Submitted to 5 business directories
5 social networks createdWork and ranking report highlighting what has been done at the end of the month.
Most of the stuff I've done already or can do myself. The elements that make me a bit suspicious are the:
- 1 article plus 19 spun variations?
- 5 social networks created? What does that even mean?
I did get this for about £20 for the 1st month with no commitment afterwards so I am tempted to let them try. But should I be a bit wary it might do more harm than good in the long run?
Any advice\opinions would be much appreciated.
-
LoL, no that's not real SEO, it's fake SEO and won't do anything for you. It's the kind of stuff that worked years back when no-one else was doing it.
Aside from that, you won't get good SEO for those sorts of low costs anyway... I have a tantrum about it here if you're interested in knowing what to avoid
-
With these tactics you will probably get to page one (position 6-10) for some low competition keywords. But i highly doubt you will even see the return on even this low amount of money.
With long-term employment of this strategy you do run the risk of getting a penalty, but at these volumes (depending on niche and keyword comp) you should not get one, but that does not mean i am advocating it.
I would highly suggest against tactics like this and companies like these as they probably have a huge footprint, that can be seen as "spammy" techniques easily.
19 spun versions of 1 article - This would be the worst of all. They have actually taken an idea, and made it less effective then if they just did the one LOL
I say no go.. do this work yourself and concentrate on what you think the users of your site would want, not what some SEO company thinks they want in a box...
w00t!
-
If you ask the question that it may do more harm than it probably is not worth it. I think if you can do it yourself, I would take your time and do it yourself (not worth the risk).
-
Submit site to all major search engines
That set off my BS meter.
-
There's no real reason to move forward with this. It looks like they're just going to syndicate your article across multiple spammy sites, damaging your link profile and reducing your authenticity at the same time. Take your time, publish your own content and be a genuine part of communities. Being controlling in this situation will benefit you in the long run.
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
-
Disappearing Links Black Hat ?
I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site. The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link. At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company. Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Whether to use new domain or old ecommerce site domain that has been incomplete for a long time.
Hello, We are starting a second store in our niche. Which of the following should I choose: A. We have a site from a year and a half ago that we put content on but never actually added products. The category and article content needs to be completely rewritten. We will completely rewrite the content to be much better and up to date. We're planning on adding products and rewriting the manufacturer descriptions. B. We could use a new domain that is closer to exact match for our main keyword. We'd just buy one for $15 I don't know whether A or B would be the fastest way to get the site going. I'm concerned that leaving a site half done for a year could cause an issue, but I really don't know. If you've got experience with this, please advise. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Black Hat Link Building Ethics Question
I have taken on the SEO/Inbound duties for my company and have been monitoring some of our competitors in the market space. In June one of them began a black hat link building campaign that took them from 154 linking root domains to about 7500 today. All of the links target either /header or /permalink/index and all have anchor text along the lines of "Windows 7 activation code." They are using forgotten forums and odd pages, but seem to be finding high DA sources to place the links. This has skyrocketed their DA (40 to 73), and raised their mozRank, mozTrust, and SERP positions. Originally I thought to report it to Google, but I wanted to wait a few weeks and see what the campaign did for them and if Google would catch on. I figured adding 81K links in 2 months would trigger something (honestly, if I was able to find out they were doing it then it's got to be obvious). But they have grown every week and no drop in rankings. So my question is would you report it? Or continue to wait and see? Technically they are not a "competitor" in the strictest sense of the word (we actually do sell some of their products as OEM), but I find the tactic despicable and it makes my efforts to raise our rankings and DA seem ineffective to people not in the know about SEO. Interested to see everyone's responses! Taylor
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anneoaks0 -
Can somebody tell me if this is a black hat tactic??
I'm new to SEO, so somebody needs to explain to me what is kosher or not. Playing around with opensiteexplorer I came across a network of websites that all link together from a page of links, only the linking page is hidden to the viewer, with an empty anchor tag or something small like a period. example http://zinasdayspa.com/ links to http://zinasdayspa.com/links_baltimore_hair_salon_day_spa_fells_point_federal_hill_canton_maryland.phpwith a tag at the very bottom, that links to http://www.6611111.com. It's interesting because some of these websites rank high with google, but when I do link:http://www.6611111.com, google shows no results! Something very strange is about this, and I wanted to know how http://www.6611111.com ranks so high for such a competitive keyword such as stop smoking, and if this is blackhat. My intuition tells me it is, but I'm also curious how it ranks high.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tguide0 -
How to run SEO tests you don't want to be associated with
A client has a competitor who is ranking above them for a highly competitive term they shouldn't really be able to rank for. I think I know how the site got there, and I think I can replicate it myself with a quick test, but it's definitely grey hat if not black hat to do so. I do not want my own sites and company to be damamged by the test, but i'd like to let the client know for sure, and also i'd love to know myself. The test should take about a week to run, there is no hacking involved or password stealing or anything damaging to another. How would you do such a test? I'm dubious about using my own server / site for it, but would a week really matter? Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Link Building with links in footer of Word Press Themes- Is This BLack Hat??
I See lots of free word press themes with links in footer like Kids Headphones | Colombia Classifieds | Broadway Tickets Is this a valid white hat link building method? What if the theme looked like a particular industry and the links related to the industry would that be better?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Farmer Update Case Study. Please question my logic here. (Very long!)
Hi SEOmoz community! I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces. So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched. Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources. Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day). Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus. I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed. After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again. My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness. My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not. My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure? Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update 🙂 So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YesBaby0