Page 30 - The Dark Side of Back Link Building
P. 30
PART 2
Link Negotiation
Deals struck in back-alley email inboxes.
Links changing hands for the right price.
Or unspoken agreements that seem perfectly reasonable.
If you trade something for a link, be it money, other links, or goods and services, you
could be flirting with trouble unless you clearly disclose it.
The rub is that disclosing these relationships generally means sacrificing the SEO
value of the links. And often, people would rather not do that.
Even today, people still trade and purchase links like SEO commodities without
disclosure. It should come as no surprise that Google has been explicit that it doesn’t
like these tactics, and it can ignore these links whenever it detects them.
In Google’s view, links should be genuinely earned. So, which kinds of negotiation
tactics are frowned upon? Do they still work, and is there a way to engage in them
ethically? Let’s look at three of the main examples and investigate.