Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#11

Post by profitbaron » Wed, Aug 10, 2011, 9:06 PM UTC

The email is off an SEO company. This is one of the many tactics which they use to boost their clients website rankings without making them look suspicious to the search engines.

Another method they use, is that they provide free content to web masters on the condition that the content contains a couple of links - some to the site they want to link to - and others to authority sites to make the content look authentic. They go as far as even paying the website owners to place the article on their website.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#12

Post by TMK » Wed, Aug 10, 2011, 9:53 PM UTC

answerly wrote: post #10

dmc wrote: post #4

Very common, link purchasing is a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice. Did you mean 'black hat'?

black hat would be hacking websites and adding those links to he hacked websites. :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#13

Post by cheae » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 1:23 AM UTC

TMK wrote: post #12

answerly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice. Did you mean 'black hat'?

black hat would be hacking websites and adding those links to he hacked websites. :)

It doesn't matter what we call that but Google sees that as a black hat technique

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#14

Post by og1 » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 3:05 PM UTC

I've gotten a few of these. When I did some research on the company it sounded like some of these links could be about gambling and herbal pills. That could have some implications for search engine ranking because you are now promoting a questionable site. Also, wasn't too keen about the annual agreement; term seemed too long. Ultimately, I decided not to do it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#15

Post by ohashi » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 4:15 PM UTC

How common? Pretty common. I actually considered trying to make a business model of building low content/automated sites and monetizing through these guys. The amount they pay in general beats adsense by a factor of 10 (or 100) on a low traffic site. Their interest is the link, most sites with no maintenance or work are getting low/no traffic but may still have ranking weight. So it's an easy way to make them profitable.

Consider WP Blog + cheap hosting + domain. We're talking costs of ~$10 per site. You take average $150/year on an ad. You only need 1/15 sites to get approached to make this profitable. I'd say I get approached 5-10 times per year on 30-40 sites. The math is mildly attractive if I lived in a low cost country.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#16

Post by damoncali » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 5:53 PM UTC

It's extremely common and it pays pretty well, although it's not working as well as it used to. I blame google's increasing anti-webspam abilities for that (which is a good thing, I suppose).

There is a small industry catering to this market, including sites like http://linkworth.com, who has made a product out of what you're describing.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#17

Post by damoncali » Thu, Aug 11, 2011, 5:53 PM UTC

RealGeek wrote: post #7

I get several emails like this everyday. All of them go straight to trash. This is called link trading for SEO. Google is strictly against this practice.

Perhaps, but they suck at doing anything about it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#18

Post by nuttakorn » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 6:10 AM UTC

dmc wrote: post #4

Very common, link purchasing is a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

I don't think this is call white-hat SEO practice. White Hat is not directly purchase links but they do content + innovative way to get other people links to them. Link purchase is against the Google policy.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#19

Post by petervandijck » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 11:31 AM UTC

TMK wrote: post #12

answerly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice. Did you mean 'black hat'?

black hat would be hacking websites and adding those links to he hacked websites. :)

No, paying for text links that are not labeled as ads is black hat alright.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

#20

Post by dmc » Fri, Aug 12, 2011, 1:11 PM UTC

answerly wrote: post #10

dmc wrote: post #4

Very common, link purchasing is a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice. Did you mean 'black hat'?

No, black hat would be more comment backlink blasts and such, using tools like scrapebox.

I think it's called "white hat" more so than "black hat" because it's usually "safe" to do so. i.e., Google will not be able to automatically detect these links which are against their terms of service to penalize them.