Is This A Reasonable SEO Strategy?

[zigojacko]

Am I right in saying that, if you get punished for link farm links or other dubious links, telling Google that "A big bad SEO company did it" is no excuse?

What would the legal position be there between the website owner and SEO firm? Suppose I hire an SEO firm and specify "no dodgy links please", then the SEO firm go and do just that, then Google knocks you back 10 pages or whatever for naughtiness.

What would be the likely outcome?
Jay

Your website would still remain penalised even if it was an SEO company that carried out your link building. You would have to read the companies terms and conditions, it is more than likely many will specify in the smallest of prints that they accept no responsibility if your website gets black listed or penalised in the search engines.

9/10 link building companies will promise you that they manually seek all links and don't use any black-hat techniques... 99% of them are lying and probably don't even know what "black-hat" is. With the services and amount of links they are offering, it is sometimes impossible to do the work being promised all manually without using any automated software/black-hat methods.

 

[Jay-Art]

Thanks Geoff
Its a tricky one. Too slow to sift thru rubbish to find and place good links and too dangerous to use the mass providers. What's a man to do?
Jay

 

[RedEvo]

For the most part it's not so much punishment - unless you are caught red handed using a pure black hat technique such as cloaking, hacking, buying links etc - so much as the links that were helping you stop helping you as they are devalued. The impact is the same as your rankings fall of a cliff.

If this wasn't the case people would be paying companies to link build their clients sites on link farms.

d

 

[zigojacko]

Thanks Geoff
Its a tricky one. Too slow to sift thru rubbish to find and place good links and too dangerous to use the mass providers. What's a man to do?
Jay

You are right, despite what many of these companies say that just want to fleece you out of thousands of pounds and feed you with rubbish, link building is very time consuming and can be very difficult.

I have already been thinking of some off-site SEO for your website which I will discuss with you shortly.

 

[Jay-Art]

Does anyone know of this company? http://www.micrositez.co.uk/

They make some big claims and back it up with some pretty convincing evidence. Some of these high positions are against a lot of competition. Of course not to say they werent too far away from where they are now before Micrositez started work.

If anyone knows of them, Id be interested to hear their opinions?
Thanks,
Jay

 

[Jay-Art]

Thank you Geoff (Zigojacko) I guess the company in my last post would come under this description too?
Jay

 

[RedEvo]

Does anyone know of this company?

They link to their clients sites using specific keywords on their own homepage which smacks of desperation. By offering so many links for a set fee it has to be spam and if you analyse the link profiles of some of their sample sites that's verified. But what they do works - for the moment...

d

 

[zigojacko]

Does anyone know of this company? http://www.micrositez.co.uk/

They make some big claims and back it up with some pretty convincing evidence. Some of these high positions are against a lot of competition. Of course not to say they werent too far away from where they are now before Micrositez started work.

If anyone knows of them, Id be interested to hear their opinions?
Thanks,
Jay

Not familiar with them personally, however, after checking out their website, this is exactly what I mean...

• Manual Directory Submissions - 99% of which will probably not provide any value.
• Do-Follow Social Bookmark Links - 75% of which are social bookmarking website that have poor traffic levels/full of spam.
• Manual Forum Posts - Joining a forum to create an article including keyword rich anchor text, will almost certainly see you get banned and there is little value in forum signature links as recently discussed on UKBF.
  
• Do-Follow Web 2.0 Links - Anyone can do with any social media aggregator.
  
• Guaranteed Article Links - Again, as recently discussed... Hardly any value. (Depends)
  

From £999 as well! That's a lot of money which you won't be able to get away with as a one off, this is how many of them work; charge the earth to pay for the bodies they have sitting their manually doing all this work only for the efforts to remain ranked well for a short spell before all that work is required again.

 

[Jay-Art]

Thanks RedEvo
Thats very interesting. I have had this site in my favourites for months, just wanted an opinion on it. Could see how someone would fall for it tho, in defence of anyone who has. They cite being rated as No.1 in UK for SEO with their awards plastered all over their pages etc. Pretty compelling stuff.
Much appreciated.
All the best,
Jay

 

[zigojacko]

Thank you Geoff (Zigojacko) I guess the company in my last post would come under this description too?
Jay

See my comments on it above

 

[Jay-Art]

Thanks Zigo, Im seeing a pattern form here.
Cheers,
Jay

 

If google does not stamp on it and there does to be any signs that it is in a big way we will end up with big companies taking control of 10 slots on page one.

The big boys are waking up to the web is where the business is at and much more so in the future. It will enable them to reduce costs and increase profits. What may on here forget is that we were all early starters and adopters. The big wave is just building but it is coming.

The very thing that makes the web great ie anyone can use it to find information and make money could be lost as the big boys dominate it.

Many , many big businesses both private and public are losing money. Newspapers, Councils, Universities etc etc all desperate for revenue of any sort.

I suspect you seo guys would be interested in 50-100 links from those sort of sites?

10 links from the Times sir No problem that will be £XXX

It you are small and intend to stay small or medium sized and their is big players in your sector you should be very concerned with this.

There may be technical reasons why this may not happen.

The big boys have been at it for a number of years without making that much impression.

allied to which google seems to be demoting the importance of links in relation to other factors and may in time have to dismiss them in total.

Having said that PPC can get anyone with deep enough pockets up the top.

Earl

 

[RedEvo]

.....allied to which google seems to be demoting the importance of links in relation to other factors and may in time have to dismiss them in total.

I've racked what grey matter I have and can't fathom how they could stop using links as an important metric. I'm not saying they won't - they are a clever bunch - but it's hard to think of a scalable substitute. What are your thoughts on what might replace them?

d

 

I've racked what grey matter I have and can't fathom how they could stop using links as an important metric. I'm not saying they won't - they are a clever bunch - but it's hard to think of a scalable substitute. What are your thoughts on what might replace them?

d

Well I agree it would be hard to find another metric.:|

Maybe they will keep them in a more minor role as they must be aware of how easy it is to cheat the SERP's and there main stated concern is quality.

Something that is not always equated with a top ranked site.

I suppose there could be other metrics that come more into play.

Age of site,size of site,domain relevance,quantity of keywords.etc.?:|

As said they know that buying links is an unfair way to gain an advantage and maybe they will want to do something about it.

But maybe not.

Earl

 

[adventurelife]

There may be technical reasons why this may not happen.

The big boys have been at it for a number of years without making that much impression.

allied to which google seems to be demoting the importance of links in relation to other factors and may in time have to dismiss them in total.

Having said that PPC can get anyone with deep enough pockets up the top.

Earl

Earl you and the other boys on here will know the technical stuff better than me. However, I have made money in the past ,current and hopefully future by having eyes and ears and understanding and seeing what is likely to happen round the corner from know. I agree they have been at it for years but they are only now starting to treat the web as a serious revenue channel. They now have younger place in senior positions making sure they do.

We will see more and more businesses hit the cross over point where they leave bricks and mortar and just go web.

I can see and feel something building that will make all us small businesses very uncomfortable unless you are in a market they are not interested in.

 

[Jay-Art]

A scary thought..

 

[weareable]

It amazes me the amount of debate regarding google. Its realy quite simple, Google have set out their do's and dont's and couldn't make it any clearer.
They provide free advice, webmaster tools to check your site and forums to help you get things right.
There will always be wide boys who flout the guidelines and take your money for short term gains but they wont take the rap when google penalizes your site for link buying.
The major search engines have far more time, money and resorces than any seo company. Whatever wizzardry SEO'S are using they will inevitably fall foul of the all seeing eye's of the major search engines.
While it wont take long for these companies to change their methods and find other quick fixes it will take your site much longer to recover from any penalties.
As for the one rule for big players, Try telling BMW http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4685750.stm

 

Earl you and the other boys on here will know the technical stuff better than me. However, I have made money in the past ,current and hopefully future by having eyes and ears and understanding and seeing what is likely to happen round the corner from know. I agree they have been at it for years but they are only now starting to treat the web as a serious revenue channel. They now have younger place in senior positions making sure they do.

We will see more and more businesses hit the cross over point where they leave bricks and mortar and just go web.

I can see and feel something building that will make all us small businesses very uncomfortable unless you are in a market they are not interested in.

You may well be right.

But one has to ask whats in it for google et al ,giving away all that fat juicy traffic for nowt when they could be charging all these deep pockets.

ask yourself how would you feel giving away all that freebie stuff.?

Just a thought.

Earl

 

It amazes me the amount of debate regarding google. Its realy quite simple, Google have set out their do's and dont's and couldn't make it any clearer.

If only it was.

Earl

 

[irishguru]

Your onsite optimization needs tending to before you try any offsite optimization.

And I concur with copying what your competitors do but not exactly copy but to mimic their strategy instead.

 

Your onsite optimization needs tending to before you try any offsite optimization.

And I concur with copying what your competitors do but not exactly copy but to mimic their strategy instead.

Much better to invent your unique method than copying others mistakes.

Earl

 

[omnivore]

No it's not. Because there is one more very real risk (no, certainty) of using paid links.

That you'll stop paying one day, and you'll loose them all and have absolutely no benefit for all the cash that you've spent on them whatsoever.

presumaby though you would get many more natural links to your site as a result of you being high in google (driven by your paid-for links) so the paid-for links would in themselves help to ensure your resilience to algo changes?

 

presumaby though you would get many more natural links to your site as a result of you being high in google (driven by your paid-for links) so the paid-for links would in themselves help to ensure your resilience to algo changes?

Quite true a site that ranks highly in the SERP's is more likely to attract Links.

Earl