Affiliate Marketing Blog: What Can "Crappy Link Building" Do For You?

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

What Can "Crappy Link Building" Do For You?

I've pulled the post as I'd like more clients of theirs to check for a more complete analysis.

But basically looking at the stats for one large client about 96% of the links to the site weren't achieved by the service - which is fair enough. But the ones achieved were mostly irrelevant and/or PR0. Email me for the info if you like.

11 Comments:

At 21 January 2009 at 11:23 , getvisible said...: People are probably wondering why I've not mentioned the company concerned. Well its because I've not got any beef with the company concerned or the people that run it. I just have a dislike for the mass-market approach to link-building.
At 21 January 2009 at 12:04 , Anonymous said...: Good day! we're onto this and will review the site shortly. Check their positions in a month or so.
At 21 January 2009 at 15:49 , Kefalonia said...: Lee - have you sent an email to Simon at the company involved in the first post to give them chance to respond?

Whats written is quite negative and while I know you dont like their methods it would be interesting to get their take on it as a balance?
At 21 January 2009 at 16:19 , getvisible said...: I was going to, then got distracted with a tonne of MSN's and now they've probably read it already.

But I've not drawn attention to the company name. I believe that the issue is just a filtering one - filtering who gets the emails and who they engage with.

It could be a very useful tool, if it were not for this aspect.
At 21 January 2009 at 17:08 , getvisible said...: I've asked if the data was erroneous and for some supporting information regarding the success of such approaches.

I'm more than happy (as I've said before) to change my mind. When you've only got data that leads you to think one way, that's all you're going to do until you've got data pointing the other.

Hopefully everyone that reads this will have some counter-balancing information shortly.
At 21 January 2009 at 17:21 , getvisible said...: I'm thinking I may have been a tad unfair. I'm reviewing the links to a well established site with significant marketing budget. I should also be reviewing the link building efforts of a new, unestablished site with minimal budget.

The relative return of link-building at the margins is obviously greater for those sites.
Initial link-building efforts for these sites is crucial to starting the whole SEO strategy rolling.
At 21 January 2009 at 17:30 , Kefalonia said...: I'd just be interested to hear what the response rate of these emails they send is?

As I've mentioned on your blog previously i'm rubbish at link building so I may try them soon as an experiment to supliment other activity and will be happy to give a fair unbiased review when I do.

In fairness to the company in question a lot of large comps use them and some smaller affiliates too so I assume it does work to a degree (I was flattered to receive an email from one of their clients the other day).

Its odd that you couldnt find the links in this case though especially after a the amount of research you did.
At 21 January 2009 at 19:46 , Unknown said...: Yeah I do think the post was lacking in your usual balanced approach Lee, there are an almost endless stream of variables which define the success or failure of a linking campaign. I'd argue that in this instance the clients sector plays a large role, uber competitive with little to differentiate does not an easy campaign make. There is a fundamental need to build links for all sites, which is, when it comes down to it, a flaw in the mighty Googles algo. Its effective in areas where quality content is the key driver but ignores most commercial applications. Why link to another sweater shop, they sell sweaters - who cares. These campaigns add value to both sides of the transaction. It also must be said that counting links does not consider link weighting at all - which is very often nothing to do with PR.
At 21 January 2009 at 19:53 , getvisible said...: yeh that's why I pulled it.

It's alright having an entrenched viewpoint if your have looked at all influencing factors. I felt that even though most of the probably-attributable links were (in my opinion) of poor quality, it doesn't mean that it was indicative of the approach in general. That's why I'd like the company concerned to give their view point at the same time (I've not heard from them yet).

Also some people may call me "stalkerish" lol but me being persistent has helped (to some degree) over the years on such topics such as Spyware, brand bidding, voucher codes etc. Maybe if they'd been in the industry as long they may be able to say they've actually played their part in making it a better industry.

[now that was a rant!] normal diplomatic service will be resumed shortly!
At 23 January 2009 at 00:21 , Anonymous said...: It is a shame I missed your post. Personally I have seen some terrible services that end up having their clients websites penalized by Google across their entire website, or others where they rank fine for some terms but any of the terms that had spammy incoming links (blog reviews, run of sites etc) were banned for those individual terms.
At 23 January 2009 at 10:00 , Anonymous said...: Hi Guys

Simon here – will have to make this my last response for a while – 100 hour weeks and stress level off the scale at the moment.

We work under binding non-disclosure agreements with all clients which, much as I want to, prevents me from providing any level of detailed information on a particular campaign or client. The following is, I hope, some helpful insights into our approach, addressing points raised here and on the initial thread.

First up, a number of website owners and I believe at least one other link building firm have copied some of our email formats and are now using them for their own campaigns! Quite flattering in some ways but not good news really – I’m sure some of those won’t exercise the same degree of care and will damage the market as a whole. So – please don’t assume that similarly formatted emails are necessarily from us!!

In terms of the relevance and quality of link partners, as soon as someone responds to a campaign, the site is hand reviewed by our UK team for relevance and quality against a detailed set of criteria to ensure that it is an appropriate link partner for the client. This includes checking for relevance, content, warm networks, link farms, nofollows, sensibly themed linking etc. etc etc. If it isn’t an appropriate partner we don’t link.

On link balance, some of our campaigns are a mixture of reciprocal links and the content in return for a link approach, others cover the content approach only – this is totally determined by clients and their willingness to return links. (FYI I can tell you that in the campaign under discussion, reciprocal linking is not included). We always advise clients to include both options wherever possible as a mixture of inbound only, outbound only and reciprocals is more reflective of a natural link structure than emphasising any one of these approaches.

Basically we work to achieve the same legitimate results for clients as they would achieve by sitting a bunch of their own people at desks and doing everything by hand. We use people, process and technology to achieve this and to introduce as much efficiency, accuracy and economy of scale as we can with minimum compromise. Unlike many link building firms, we don’t raid our own database or use friends and family networks to deliver silly numbers of dangerous links. We go to the market cold for each client. As you should.

Cost justification for clients is the main driver – all of you no doubt know that return on investment in SEO is very strong -- but its also mostly long term. Clients’ budgets are driven by this which, in turn, determines what we are able to reasonably charge – and believe me, the marginality in this area of the business is far lower than in many other facets of SEO.

Our investment in processes and technology is massive - over a million lines of server code. By far the weakest link in the chain is that in some campaigns we have to rely on the search engines’ relevancy algorithms when targeting potential partners for a particular term or theme. It generally works well but of course some broadly-themed blogs (such as this one) together with digital marketing, creative, web design and portfolio type pages will often rank highly for these terms and will be wrongly targeted as a result. Actually, many of those turn into “not for this site but actually we have . . .” positive dialogues.

With the level of link fatigue out there (thanks offshore guys – really helps), response rates even to the strongest campaigns are too low to make hand checking each site before targeting it anywhere near realistic (back to clients’ return on investment models). So - some of our mails hit the wrong people. We spend a lot of energy on tuning our approach to minimise this. For example, in some campaigns we are able to focus on going after our clients’ competitors’ link equity. Actually in the last year, our mail volumes have increased hugely but annoyed responses have stayed at about the same level. We hate upsetting anyone. We always apologise (unless the response is abusive – look forward to having a major rant of my own on that aspect some day!) – and we always respect opt-outs – we have a complex system to make sure that works properly. I can’t tell you how many emails we send out a month across campaigns but it is a serious number. What I can tell you is that all annoyed responses are sent to me to handle personally and we currently receive less than 10 per month.

If we could find a way in which to generate the positive dialogues and appropriate links we achieve for our clients without hitting anyone we shouldn’t and without breaking clients’ budgets, believe me we would. Sending unsolicited email is the only area of our business that is anything less than ideal. We are committed to continuing to refine our approach and our offerings with this in mind.

All the best - Simon