PubCon Seminar on "Buying Links..."

After a quick look at these two seminar outlines, and then a detailed read of same...I'd think that MOST of us would agree on the basic premise....

Dont' buy links, unless you or your client can afford that kind of risk!

Oh, us? We used to back in 03 and 04...but no longer!

The seminar is blogged both here...

and here too!

Read. Learn. Rank!



Jim

It is strange that in a panel of 6 SEO people, one of which is anti link building, 5 of which tell you how to do it in a low risk manner.

You say that the consensus is that we don't do it and its bad?

oh well people read things in different ways .......

Greg Shuey suggests "Advertise link targeted content. It isn’t a sin to purchase links to advertise your link targeted content." JVRudnick, could you chime in and interpret what this statement means to you?

I'm thinking of a site (bigfishtackle dot com) where a few of our competitors advertise (/superstore-apparel dot htm). It seems that bigfishtackle shares much (of course, not all) of the responsibility for top five "fishing shirts" page rankings. So based on the article at seo dot com, would you say buying ads at bigfishtackle is black, gray, or white hat?

I'd appreciate knowing your thoughts.

sure...would love to look at this....first your quote.

from what I take it this guy means, he's talking about the uses of link bait -- here's his full quote -- "Advertise link targeted content. It isn’t a sin to purchase links to advertise your link targeted content. You are trying to get the word out about what you are trying to offer or share with others. You aren’t trying to get rankings for that page with the purchased links..."

you see, when he comments that this is ADVERTISING, and for those pages, when these pages are indexed and run thru the G algo, there is no penalty for those advertisers...follow this? ie a scott free usage is what he thinks....and I agree here too! and,there is no SEO juice for that page either...a complete wash for both site and advertisers...eh?

and for the further question, about the fishing tackle site, the usage here is exactly the same as above....ie there would be NO penalty again for this kind of paid link ADVERTISING...ie this is white hat to me. we have lots of clients who use this kind of advertising, and we have yet to see ANY penalty...

and further, IMHO, advertising seems to be "outside" in some way/manner of penalties....I have no concrete evidence of anything to the contrary....BUT...I do have evidence that paid links, ie pure keyword links not display adverts etc. CAN be penalized. we've had clients who've done this on their own and yes, against our advice...and yes, there were some issues with same.

which gets us back to RISK. this IMHO is the value of knowing what risks you bring to a client SEO campaign....and then there's the whole issue of why some display banners and adverts get by and keyword text links dont. all I have so far is anecdotal evidence so far....nothing that even seems to run "true" for diff sites/channels on a comparitive basis...sigh.

so, where are we? if the site is yours, do what you wanna do..
but if it's for a client, then I think you DO need to make full disclosure about that risk to allow the client to make an informed decision.

least, that's how I feel about it today....and knowing G, thing's just might change by the coming weekend!



Jim

One thing we can count on is change right? Thanks Jim for taking the time to give your thoughts. With all you've written, we'll proceed with caution... at least for the coming weekend.

As you've looked into this particular case, did you see any rationale for some of the top five (G) to be ranking so high for "fishing shirts"? Other than ADVERTISING and internal linking, I don't see a lot of juice for a couple of these sites - quite the contrary. One report gave two of these sites a KW phrase grade of C+ and the other an F! So much for conventional wisdom. I can't put my finger on what else could be going on behind the scenes to provide these results.

Thanks much,

Rex

flyfisherman....umm. sorry, but without a real look at those top 5 sites, and delving into their links, competitive analysis of same etc etc...I can't really say without investing the time....sorry....

you need to 'do' what you need to do, or perhaps hire an SEO practitioner for that kind of report....shouldn't be too dear either....I'd be willing to send along, or you can ask here in the SEO Professionals forum for quotes on that...

BUT...do remember, you'll need to hire a pro with reference and serp stats to prove their skillSet....else you might as well burn the cash instead....



Jim