Beer for Backlinks
Interflora found out last week that paid backlinks help get your ranked and then condemn you to search oblivion when Google detects what you’re doing. Interflora in the UK bought a series of advertorials across a bunch of news outlets to help get ranked in the lead up to Valentines day. The best analysis I’ve read is on the Dave Naylor blog. The debacle also prompted Google to remind everyone that buying links is very naughty. However there are ways to buy backlinks that Google either can’t detect or is ok with.
Three types of paid backlinks for SEO that Google can’t detect.
Google will often make examples of high profile brands when it catches them doing something that violates their quality guidelines but it has to actually catch them. You can be the judge if the tactics below violate the guidelines
Sponsor community groups
Want to get ranked for local searches? Go to the most popular community sites in your area and offer to sponsor them. You may want to mention it would be nice if they wrote a little piece about you with a backlink to your site. Sporting groups, schools, churches whatever.. go crazy.
Giver a donation of services to a link pig
A link pig is a site that naturally has lots of backlinks to it. Large charities or non profits often fall into this category as do a lot of bloggers. Money may not necessarily cut it with these guys but a donation of services may as it gives them something to write about.
Send beer
This is directly from the link above “exchanging goods or services for links” is verboten. How the hell can Google know if I sent you a slab of beer in exchange for a backlink? The truth is it can’t. Seriously exchanging services for links is bad? I’m a poor struggling edu.au and I need donations of services from the local community, I cant thank them with a backlink when it’s the only currency I have?
Google has destroyed the idea of backlinks
Google created this monster and it is getting to hard for them police with any degree of sanity. This is why I believe we will see Authorship or AuthorRank as a stronger signal in the future.
Who likes beer? Got a website I can look at 😉 Do you have any other ideas for getting backlinks like the above? Love to hear them.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
