Pay Per Post Blog Reviews - Does It Work?
-
I have come to realize that several SEO companies are basing their entire link strategy on paying bloggers to write a review about their client's website that also includes a link back to their website. I am thinking about adding this as part of my link building campaign. I am thinking about acquiring approximately 15 links a month from PR 2-5 blogs that pertain to my industry and target audience. I am thinking of using the network payperpost.com to find good blogs.
First question: Does this type of link building work well?
Second question: Is 15 links a month from PR 2-5 blogs (writing on my subject matter) enough to help out?
-
Really great insight, Ryan. Your input is greatly appreciated. Especially on the topic of deeper page links and multiple different domains. Thanks for contributing.
-
I think that you can get links that will lift your rankings from these services. However, I feel that these are risky links. The risk is probably one of the links being devalued and your site dropping an amount equivalent to the links being removed - thus you wasted your money.
I would not use this service. I would instead invest in content with the goal of having a quality level that is high enough that other webmasters will link to it without any work or payment from me.
-
Does this type of link building work well?
Absolutely
** Is 15 links a month from PR 2-5 blogs (writing on my subject matter) enough to help out?**
Yes.
Paid blogging exists because it works. With that said, Google is getting better at adjusting for low quality content and the blog farms. Usually a paid blogger posts in perfect English, with the right post title, the right keyword usage, etc. They are trained to write for SEO. The problem is the actual quality of the content they write is usually low. They don't know nor understand the topics they are writing about.
On the other hand, many experts will write about topics, but they are not always proficient with English. Also they don't understand SEO mechanics so while they share great information, it is often not presented optimally from a SEO perspective. So when Google balances things out, a paid blog article can rank higher then an article written from an expert on the topic. There are many factors involved of course, but these are some of them.
I am sure there will be others who will disagree with the perspective I am sharing. Of course all sites should strive to create great content. The internet has too many paid bloggers and others who just fill the internet with fluff making it harder for users to get the real content they need. Google still rewards sites for using paid bloggers with higher rankings. As long as that is the case, they will still be used by those without the resources to create the content on their own.
With respect to the amount of links, it is all relative. How many links does your site have presently? Are these articles linking to your home page? Or are they linking to deeper pages? Are the links from 15 different blogs with different root domains? Are they blogging from a general wordpress domain or from a topic specific blog? There are many factors used to evaluate the value of a link. Without seeing your site I would suggest that 15 links/month is enough to help most small to medium sites quite nicely.
-
So would you say that this method of link building (paying per blog post or review) is a good link building strategy?
-
Second question: Is 15 links a month from PR 2-5 blogs (writing on my subject matter) enough to help out?
Maybe Yes, Maybe No. It depends upon who you are attacking.
Linkbuilding is not a game of numbers, it is a game of relative velocity. Let's say that your competitor has 150 links and you might say... "If I get 15 links per month I should catch him in about a year." That works well if your competitor has a crappy site that attracts no natural links and if he is sitting on his butt instead of linkbuilding.
However, if your competitor is gaining 20 links per month and you are only gaining 15 then you will never catch him.
Also, if your competitor has 150,000,000 links and you gain 15 per month you will never catch him.
So, it depends upon who you are competing against, how hard they are working and how their content smells.
(I am not touching that first question... some people would say that they are paid links and even if they are not considered paid links those blogs could be into other types of manipulation. Be careful and realize the potential risks.)
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
-
What is the best way to start building links without paying for them?
I am starting new websites for my clients and want to know where to start. I understand that rich, engaging content gets links naturally, but how do we get links to rich content that noone has ever seen?
Link Building | | Prestonp0 -
Blog on subdomain?
Hello, I am going to add a blog to my site.
Link Building | | AdAdam
I use cloudfront CDN to host my whole site (its a 1 page parallax type thing now)
With cloudfront I can not easily do dynamic content but it is possible. So I have a few options blog.mydomain.com pointing to a regular server
www.mydomain.com/blog/ uploading static html pages for my blog, its a slight hassel but not too bad What could be best for SEO? will having blog.mydomain.com be seen that much differently to google? are they smart enough to see it as just another section of my site? Another spanner in the works is that I have a domain for australia and a totally different domain for international sales with no content or structure duplication between them
Could I maybe be better off with a myname.wordpress.com blog and linking it to both my domains?
There are a ton of spam wordpress blogs so I am not sure what would be best. My blog will not be intended for just SEO purposes.0 -
External linking on a company blog
This has been bothering me for a long time. Our company has a sub-domain blog that gets a respectable amount of traffic but not a lot of SER. Most of our traffic comes from social shares (although we do rank really high for a few key searches). The blog manager is convinced that providing external links to additional resources or source material "dilutes the SEO juice" for the blog. URLs are provided, but they aren't linked. Attempts to sway her to the idea that external links are actually Good Things® have been stonewalled. Tell me I'm right and why.
Link Building | | AMSVansSEOTeam0 -
Should I remove links from my internal blog?
I have blogs/news sites on every one of my clients' websites (each representing a different business within the same industry - self storage). On each of these blog sites, I have a writer who places about 3-5 exact keyword match links (varying anchor text) to give interlink juice to the other off-site businesses owned by the client. Each of these blogs receive about five posts per week. I am sure this is mega-over-optimizing and a stupid thing to do considering penguin. So, my questions are: Moving forward - 1. Should i stop adding so many blog articles to each site? 2. How many interlinking anchor texts should I use per blog? 3. Should I go back and either get rid of all those interlinks on past blogs or just trash the blog articles altogether? Please help if you can - I very much appreciate the responses best bd
Link Building | | creativeguy0 -
How to link blog posts to web pages
In past I would write blog posts and link to a static web page. The link from the blog post to the static web page would be the same keyword(s) as the web page was optimized around. With the latest Google updates, it seems like the keywords linking to the web page need to be varied, but I'm not sure what the ideal system would be?
Link Building | | Doug_Hay0 -
Pros and Cons for Paying for Guest Posts?
While searching for outreach targets I came across a site that charges $100 to post your infographic with a review. I think this is similar to someone that says "Sure, I'll publish your guest post. First, please send me $100." I'm curious what others think about the practice of paying for guest posts? (It seems like it could easily be lumped in with paid links from Google's point of view).
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Same Content on Different Blogs
We host our blog on WordPress as part of our site. The blog "address" is www.website.com/blog/post. If I were to take the same content that's on this blog and post it on a Blogger account we have, would Google consider that duplicate content? If not, would there be any benefit to doing this?
Link Building | | rdreich490 -
Where/should I post my press release/articles on my own website?
I have started a long-term article marketing campaign and press release distribution. I will have about 4 articles and press releases in total every month. Although the press releases will not be self-promotional, sometimes they will be talking about a certain product that we unveil. The question is, due to the high quality of these press releases, should I put them on my website as well as publish them on third party websites? If so, because they target a specific service/product which we already have a dedicated page on our website, wouldn't that put Google in the position of choosing between the two pages? I was thinking to put them on my blog and link internally from there with the keywords that I target on those pages as anchor text. The same question for articles. Any suggestions?
Link Building | | echo10