Australian retailer offers content-for-links deal
A major pet food retailer is offering Australia’s bloggers free content in exchange for site links.
A callout on PR information site Source Bottle from Vet Shop Australia offers “quality, unique and exclusive content for free for use on your website”.
The move comes as brands become increasingly serious about building SEO through content creation.
The offer promises: “All articles to be written by professional writing team this is an opportunity to get some very high quality content at no cost. All we ask for in exchange is a short bio (2/3 lines at the end of the article and appropriate links back to our website from with the articles we provide.”
When Mumbrella approached Vet Shop Australia, the company said it would discuss its strategy in return for a link to their site. We declined.
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Sounds dodgy – doubt google will like it http://www.google.com/support/.....swer=66356
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They have a typo in their copy. “We have a limited number of spots available to please get in contact and include…”
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Who ever is doing their SEO strategy should think about the more ethical link building strategies out their imo. What I would be curious to know are they offering unique articles to all blog owners, or the same article to 10 blog owners, this would cause instant problems with duplicate content.
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But really I took like a 1 minute look on the website itself, they should focus on fixing on site first before moving to link building some on site issues inclue – Feeds missing, www resolve problems, alt tags missing, meta description missing, non targeting hierarchy tags,content non structured, url structure poor (random characters in them), on site duplicate content problems (multiple home pages), robots.txt not effectively done and the list goes on.
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Its funny how they say “all we ask for” …. a link back is a lot to ask for on every piece of content. Definitely needs to look back at their link building strategy. Would be disastrous if they created duplicate content issues for people who signed up!
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No the only company doing it. I saw Flight Centre doing it first from the same site http://www.sourcebottle.com.au.....8;qid=3823
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Sounds like some social media “expert”” has given them some advice
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Google just loves duplicate content and irrelevant links! Which fool advised them to do this?
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Hi, Steve from VetShopAustralia here. I just want to make it clear that this is not a link building scheme and doesn’t breach google guidelines. Rather we are offering unique content to spread the word about our business to the relevant sites readers. A link is an obvious request, so that the reader, once interested, can visit our site. You will see that the offer is made to both online and offline publications.
In relation to Mumbrella’s request for an interview, it is perfectly usual for a business to agree to an interview in return for the business name being mentioned. In the case of online articles, I understand that this extends to asking for the URL to be mentioned. The business person take time out of his/her busy day to answer journalists questions and its a small thing to do in return.
I do want to say thanks for the above comments and suggestions. We have a been working with a professional SEO agency, but we will look into the issues that have been mentioned.
Steve
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