OK, so you’ve secured some quotes for link building and SEO work, compared prices and thought about value for money. Since you don’t have time and patience for all this fancy content development, outreach and networking you decide to go with a cheap link building company or hire a few amateurs on Elance.
Your instruction to them: “Make me some links, many links, here’s my anchor text.” – What can go wrong, right?
Try searching for things like:
- filetype:xls pagerank elance
- filetype:csv pagerank URL email
More examples:
- http://bit.ly/AsRd4z (link report for an online pharmacy company)
- http://bit.ly/yMxp1x (link report for a furniture company)
- http://bit.ly/ws81j2 (personal profile links, usernames and passwords included)
- http://bit.ly/AiUOBQ (backlinks, link wheel and social bookmarking)
- http://bit.ly/xzC5Ok (list of link prospects)
- http://bit.ly/zTwi2e (link building targets with PageRank)
- http://bit.ly/wJgtqL (blogger outreach campaign with contact emails)
- http://bit.ly/x847gD (profiles, username and password on the right)
- http://bit.ly/webZmK (link campaign approach including email styles)
- http://bit.ly/xxY8vW (edu/gov and other high profile contacts with emails)
- http://bit.ly/yOWRx9 (profile registration data)
- http://bit.ly/As0Lxq (SEO report)
- http://bit.ly/A2Aayl (Spammy link report)
- http://bit.ly/xTDv07 (Link buying prices with instructions)
- http://bit.ly/A2j4Wb (Link / SEO report, usernames, passwords, emails)
The list continues…
Now ladies and gentlemen, I leave it up to you to comment on the risks of some of these link building methods and jeopardy careless link builders put their clients in by uploading indexable link reports online.
Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211
!! Danger Danger !!
Google has crawled these spreadsheets & most likely flagged all “resources”
You may as well buy a lottery ticket
Dan, the sad part is, the reward these spammers are still able to gain from utilizing such terrible link building techniques is still outweighing the risk. I absolutely despise seeing link profiles like this killing me in the SERP’s. Nothing I can do about it directly though. We keep preaching about long-term gain of “white hat” techniques, but when you see information like this, and it works, it rattles your mentality a little bit.
Wil Reynolds just wrote about this topic yesterday on SEOmoz (well at least about the spammy link building still getting rewarded heavily). Did you happen to read it yet?
I think the problem is you deal with many amateurs who share these types of reports with the public, and even worse have them indexed on websites, another thing which I do not trust call me paranoid is sharing link building information on Google Docs, I see many people advising on it, I have never done it and never will.
I tend to find the best way to build links is using the Twitter API and XML Sitemaps
I’ve shared many things on Google Docs and never found it an issue, but yes there is always a problem sharing anything digitally. Even via DropBox should other work mates be sharing confidential documents in the same folder that external consultants/contractors have access to…
I’m wondering if the indexing issue relates to if their Elance project is public… also sharing any of these documents in an encrypted file helps reduce the potential risk…
Well it’s all fun and games till someone get’s index…
At worst the links become devalued. All the ‘sky is falling’ Google is going to penalize my site is mostly nonsense. Otherwise wouldnt we just build crappy links to our competitors?
I notice if I build links aggressively the site will drop in the first week or two, but as long as I keep building links (dont freak out and stop what you are doingbecause you see site fall off the map) and then backlink to my first tier links the site always always always comes back better than ever.