One of my clients has been approached by a UK comapny called 'its cold outside' they claim that they will get 500 backlinks [not recipricols] in 3 months for a cost of £300. I was somewhat dubious and called them as a mystery shopper. It transpires that they have built a network of websites [over 1,000 sites] themselves, and host them independently so google wont trace the links back to one source, and then they place you links on these sites [which is where your 500 links are going to come from] They say they write 'artticles' based around the keywords you give them, and these are then placed on the sites. The person I spoke to gave me a link to one of their sites http://www.yourstreetshops.com/ My feeling is that if this site is typical of the quality of site they have then I wouldnt want to have a link on it. What is other peoples thoughts on how they are doing this? and would you say its ethical?
SEO companies with a lot of shadow domains are the ones that I will keep away from. If you have any issues later with the company, they are still in a position to remove your link.
You are quite right..... If you dont carry on paying them after the first 3 months...they remove the links.
You can get more than 500 backlinks in one month for free, so why you should buy the links for 300pounds. I dont get the logic behind that.
I would persue other link building meathods. Article submissions and press releases have worked well for me.
I use the link services of a very well respected Company called LinkVana and it sounds to me as though the company you are referring to is set up in a similar fashion I don't know anything about the particular service you are referring to, but I can tell you that LinkVana is a phenomenal service and I have managed to get 6 websites onto the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN in a very short time. What I really like about LinkVana is that whenever I stop using their service, My links WILL NOT be removed, I keep them for life! If you want more information, feel free to PM me or check out my signature. Cheers, Pat
yourstreetshops.com are not even indexed in Google, so any link there is worthless. Even if it gets indexed, the site is garbage, has no real backlinks and is linking out to far too many sites to be worth anything. Since each link is costing less than £1, the only way they can possibly make money from this is stuffing sites with dozens of links - each of those 1000 sites needs domain registration and hosting fees remember. So the more links they add, the more worthless it gets. There is absolutely no way this type of link farm can be considered ethical. I could see their whole network getting torched (maybe it already has and thats why that site is de-indexed). I can think of dozens of better ways to spend £300 than that. In fact I'd go as far as to say if I was offered this package for free, I wouldn't take it.
I won't take long for the google algo to trace these links back to the same company. Google will recognize that their first few clients all gained 500 links to the exact same sites in a similar time frame with duplicate content. So, regardless of their shadow hosting scheme, they can't fool google for long. If they took the time to vary the sites they use, produce original and varied content, etc. It could be a valid strategy. But the cut rate price tells me this is fly-by-night black hat stuff.
and sell them to some other poor soul later on who falls into their trap +1 to not even taking the offer if it was FREE