thats the trouble with my site mate, getting natural links. I've approached people asking to do an article for their blog, ran competitions, simply asked people for a link, joined in communities and gave information etc and all people want is to offer paid links for loads of money for something that will never show a ROI. Gets on my nerves when I spoke to someone and found a competitor had got loads of links by offering £100 for 6 months. I havent got that sort of budget but it seems google doesnt give a toss about paid links really
Yeah. You are right with the last statement. So long as you have a legit website (not some thin aff waffle etc.) you can get away with anything. The only things you might get in trouble with are sneaky redirects, mass automatic spam and stuff of that ilk. But you can only get so far with the schemes. Take MoneySupermarket for example, probably the site in the UK that is propped up on more paid and schemed links than any other. It has pretty good rankings, buts its not a rock solid site like something like SEOMoz, which has taken years to build up and no doubt a few million dollars.
You share a problem with many sites. Take my site (which I no longer operate, see in profile) for example. Who in their right mind is going to link to a freelance SEO (someone who probably makes a living out of spinning 1000s of garbage articles, brokering links etc.). A freelance SEO has no value. So, I created some content that I know I could get real links from real sites. Some of this was content I would have created anyway (the icons) and some of it I did purely to get links. I got a lot of good links from a lot of good sites; LunarHosts is one that comes to mind, one of the biggset U.S. hosting companies. But the links I got were still a drop in the ocean. If I wanted to turn the site into an authority site, I would literally have to work on it full time indefinitely.
Another problem is that the majority of the links were to my non-commercial content, which ranks pretty good, but the commercial pages of the site don't rank very well at all. The reason being I only did a bit a crap SEO (the link schemes that most SEOs engage in and call 'ethical & whitehat techniques') before I decided I was going to keep that site clean. SEOs should know that enquiries from the SERPs are garbage anyway.
At the end of the day, you can only get high quality links if you have a huge budget, spend a lot of time working on your site yourself or if you happen to be a well-known or evangelised company like Apple. If you have a serious business and you can't afford to at least employ one person part-time just for your content-based SEO, it won't work.
You mentioned a few things that you did to try and get links. The problem with that is you are just doing them to try and get links, which can be transparent. How long did you spend working on them? How much effort did you put in? Did they have any value? Or were they just quick marketing gimmicks?
Quality begets quality and takes time and effort and you can't get it at a cheaper price from New Delhi, the spam capital of the world. This is one of the things I found most frustrating about dealing with people who wanted top rankings. If you can't put in, you won't get out. Low budget/time = crap links. There is no magic fix. There is no magic SEO person who is better than the next and knows magic schemes to get goods links, but they will keep looking all the same.
No one really wants to link to a crappy SEO, a gambling site, another Magento rolled off the production line and so on. Because crap SEO is cheaper, easier and will get better results quicker in most cases, that is what most people get. My problem with the SEO arena is that is not what most SEOs will tell you. They will dress up their link schemes and outsourcing to India and feed you the 'all our techniques are ethical and white hat' line. And when the client comes on some forum like this and someone points out things like: the SEO company has added hidden links from your site to their site, your SEO company has put a cloaked link farm on your site, your SEO has feed you through the splog factory with a load of stolen content from the New York Times et. al. (all which I have seen brought up on here). They wheel out more lies.
The problem for SEOs is that if you tell people the truth you won't get the business as they want to buy into the idea that they can have top-notch white hat SEO fro £250 a month. So if you tell the truth, you loose out on businsses and they go to someone who does the same cheap tricks but dresses it up as a professional science. Although the people who want to buy into the lies are likely to be more painful clients.
