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on Feb 21 2012 12 comments9 DISCUSSING
Great examination of how thinking outside the box can help you earn a sustainable, high-ranking presence in your industry. Bravo!
I like Rand's post a lot, but although my SEO experience is rather limited, I've never received what I feel like is a good answer to the question of whether you can ever legitimately buy a link or if it's always scammy. And even if you buy a blog, which I think is a very smart tactic, you're still buying links. You're buying that blogs entire link graph, and everything (good & bad) that comes with that link graph.
There's nothing inherently wrong with linking two sites you own that are in the same niche and the link provides helpful context to your visitors <-- that's Google's opinion. Obviously there are a ton of gray areas in that single sentence, but buying a blog and using it to link to your other sites is the equivalent of buying a shoe store so you can stock your company's shoes.
I couldn't be happier that Rand took the 'leap' and put this out there. This is reminiscent of where the true SEO brains have been hanging out for the past few years - thinking about large brand opportunities and ways to own your control versus just influencing it. I hope to see more large-scale 'SEO as a strategic business and brand driver' posts in the near future.
I think this is some great addendum reading - http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2012/01/31/how-and-why-i-sold-get-rich-slowly/. Get Rich Slowly was purchased by Quinstreet - although the vertical makes it pretty much impossible that any of us could easily replicate it, there's some lessons/thoughts there that are worth reading about that's applicable on a smaller scale.
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OK, I saved it from the Google cache. Very insightful: http://bo.lt/53rj8
Perhaps this is a case of "why buy the milk when you can get the cow for free"?
Or maybe it's more a case of, "Why buy the milk over and over and instead just buy the entire cow."
Great analogy - I should have used that :-)
Buying blogs for the sheer SEO value is pretty common nowadays. In Germany many of my clients' competitors do it. How do they do it? Spammy. They buy a blog, insert their links and let it rot. From time to time they will add a link laden advertorial. That's all. That's no supporting hungry bloggers that's blog killing fields. Don't buy blogs just for the sake of the link juice. Blogging is a strategy not a tactic, sooner or later Google will act upon the bought and neglected blogs plague.
I'm sorry Rand, but this post reminds me of my biggest gripe with high budget white hat SEO. You forget that sometimes the best brands don't have the big budgets. Grey hat, link buying, building, manipulating is a short term tactic for getting exposure. Consider local search terms, often times dominated by nationwide niche and non-niche (yellowpages) directories which often charge through the nose a monthly fee for listings. If I can take a "grey" tactic to get a local business on the top 5 for 1/10th the cost of a pure white hat campaign, as long as my client knows the risk, and approves, I see nothing wrong with it. In fact it allows local business to compete with much larger marketing campaigns, the type that can buy up entire blogs. Grey hat SEO is simply viral marketing for SEO. It is taking a small budget with a great idea and giving it the exposure it deserves. A great man once said "Spam will get you there, quality will keep you there".