Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It had been my intention to go and buy some good quality incoming links from various relevant sites. I have even bookmarked quite a few sites with the idea of approaching them in the coming weeks.
Even though I still intend to do this, I just got a phone call from a company who specialise in getting websites incoming links. I usually just tell them the marketing manager (me) is on holiday for 6 months, so i don't have to listen to their sales pitch. Although this time, i did listen.
The deal is, they own over 1000 sites (informational they say) and will provide links to my site from at least 500. They said they would create content for these sites on my subject. Of course not all the links would appear overnight. They say 400 of their sites are all ranked PR4 or better in Google.
The price is £199, plus £100 a month.
I am sceptical about this, but maybe it is something i should consider. Has anyone else paid a company for similar services? If so, was it a positive or negative result?
Am I better sticking with my plan of going out and buying (admittedly less than 500) good quality incoming links?
I look forward to a response. The sales man will be phoning back tomorrow.
Regards,
Tim
I've never seen anything that would contradict my belief that someone who owns a thousand domain names is just out for themselves.
Are all incoming links good?
[webmasterworld.com...]
And the fact that they called you is a huge red flag. If they are a successful company, they wouldn't need to make cold calls.
Some might try to make a buck by promising quick results but in my experience, link building can't be done overnight unless you happen to find a cure for cancer or figure out how to make cars run on water.
The best way to build quality traffic is to build a site webmasters will want to link to and then ask other sites to link to your site. Link exchanges with like minded sites is fine and accepted when conducted responsibly for the end user.
I'm in the UK too and can tell you with 100% certainty that £199, plus £100 monthly is a COMPLETE waste of money.
For two reasons.
1. The fact that this clown called you should make it obvious that he has a product to sell. I get these sort of calls on a regular basis and like nothing more than to ask the sales person for concrete examples (URLs) of other sites that have benefitted from this amazing offer.
This invariably brings an abrupt end to the conversation.
2. Even if they could provide you with links from a network of 1,000 sites, can you imagine the quality of these sites? PR4 or not, they'll likely be spammy and irrelevant to your own topic.
Save your cash and buy a few select text links from reputable brokers. Don't forget that a single PR7/PR8 link from a relevanet, respected site will bring far greater benefit than 500 poor links.
Too much that's shady can be done, especially given that volume of sites, and yes, I'm getting more cynical by the day - not necessarily a bad thing.
However, I don't agree with some of the posts on the other thread. Having sites link to you should never harm your own site, because otherwise you could deliberately harm sites you don't like by linking to them from spammy sites. I think that these links would just have no worth, rather than have a detrimental effect.
And this is probably what I would get from this company. Worthless links from a few hundread crappy sites.
When they phone back (which i'm sure they will) I will politely decline their services. In fact, I didn't realise until they emailed me the details that they are the same company that have phoned me many times before. I did ask who they were over the phone, but they said a different name.
What really gets me is that they found my site from my PPC adverts. They even told me this. Which means i have had to pay for the priviledge of them contacting me.
Cheers,
Tim
P.S. I have never yet bought or signed up for anything from cold callers, so I won't make a start today.
I asked for examples of their work and for some testimonials. He gave me one site which he said now gets links on the first page of google for the search term <no specifics thanks>. I checked the site and yes, it was on the first page of results. However, i checked how many backlinks it had in Google and there were just 34. I hadn't checked this whilst on the phone to them.
I then asked if he had any other examples I could check. I asked for about 10 sites. He said they did but it wasn't worth their time in emailing me these sites because they make so little on each customer they couldn't justify it, blah blah blah. So therefore they couldn't spend 2 minutes sending me an email, yet he was quite happy to have me on the phone for over 15 minutes. This pretty much summed it up for me.
Tim
[edited by: jatar_k at 12:18 am (utc) on Oct. 1, 2006]
Google only shows a small random sampling of the links they know about. Yahoo SiteExplorer is where to look, and it's great fun if you enjoy detectiv-ing stuff. :)
check:
1. who linking to you. what pr.
2. is it direct link from their domain.com
3. or a page that is 1 click away from domain
4. is it direct http://www.example.com?
5. there is more thing to check. all those website, wats their IP? if they all originating from the same server. forget about this.
quality links never come easy. go to link exchange website like:
<snip>
...and there is many more...
[edited by: martinibuster at 11:44 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2006]
[edit reason] examplified url - Removed URLs [/edit]
Brilliant! This is, without a doubt, one of the best offers I've ever seen. If I did not already have my own google-banned sites, I would give it a whirl myself. Breeeeelyant!
