PublicSphere - 4:38 pm on Sep 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have a question regarding ethical SE Marketing practice. I've seen that a large brand is paying for lots of links on wiki website pages. They're ranking number one for the term that they seem to be using in all their link text.

They're not exactly 'paid links' because the websites publishing the links are not being paid, but a business is being paid to create the pages purely for SEO reasons.

It looks as though all the articles being created on the Wiki sites are identical (duplicate content), so it's possible that these links might do more harm than good in the long run. Although I imagine in the short term lots of links coming from multiple domains would help they're rankings.

Would you report them? Is it worth it? Or is it worth having a go at this for my own website (a competitor to the website in question). It costs less than £100 for around 100 links on around 100 different domains! Is this worth doing or might it actually do more harm than good? Like I say, they're ranking number 1, so it seems to be helping them.

What do you reckon?

Cheers,

Chris