The UK’s Worst Link Builders
As the owner of a few blogs in the UK I receive numerous emails every week from well known UK agencies wanting to buy links.
In most cases I ignore them but in some cases I email back to see what happens. Take the example of a big Leeds agency who sent the following email (names removed):
Hi,
I am interested in advertising my client on your website.
I think they would be a good match on http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/.I am interested in placing a text link add on the home page of your website.
The client I am wanting to advertise is [garden shed retailer]
Can you please get back to me on this A.S.A.P.
All The Best.
Referer 1: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=garden+shed+blog
Page visited 1: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linkbait-tuesday-garden-sheds/273/
Page visited 2: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/contact/Keyword 1: garden shed blog
Just to be clear, this person has found a post about garden sheds and thinks Blogstorm is about garden sheds. To make things worse they want a link from my homepage and not the page which is related to their site – if you are going to risk buying links at least make sure they are effective.
Buying a link from an SEO blog is like Google suicide.
It gets worse
However the funniest example yet is from one of the UK’s top 5 SEO agencies which has been emailing me lots over the last few months.
The email says something along the lines of:
I noticed you have an article about Client A on your site and I’m interested in paying you £50 to add a small reference to the relevant pages on the Client B site.
Let’s forget they are emailing a well known SEO blogger offering £50 for a link and focus on the fact they have got confused about which client they are link-building for. How many links must you be buying to mix up your clients like that?
I’ve saved the best bit for last though because this particular agency is probably the worst link-builders ever – for the simple reason that their “from” email address has a typo in the domain.
So every time I email to tell them to go away it just bounces. This has been the case every time I’ve emailed for the last few months. I’m guessing this particular link-builder isn’t getting very good results.
What amazes me is that a team leader hasn’t looked into why one of the link-builders isn’t able to build any links and figured out that it’s because his email address doesn’t work.
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 21 comments below, or add your own!
Email address fail!
Guessing your not going to name and shame then.
No, they will have to figure it out themselves.
Haha, that’s fantastic! Let them suffer.
I hate link building companies anyway. It messes with Google making information harder to find and they charge outrageous prices for something the client should be learning about and doing themselves.
There is only one Big SEO agency I can think of in Leeds? And I’m sure one of them there will read this..
There are more than one so it might not be the one you are thinking of.
Hahah!oh how i Love SEO
It must be that Branded3, they are well dodgy
joke obviously.
We’re currently having problems with a certain mobile phone site that emailed us asking for partnership, we replied asking what % they’re offering and whether they’d beat our current deal, and they didn’t reply until today. Today’s long, obviously copy-pasta email started with “we were discussing …” I lost my temper and replied “no, we weren’t discussing it. We asked a question and you’re ignoring it and sending very long irrelevant emails.”
They’re building a relationship with us and not in a good way. I’ve bought from their shops before, but this has annoyed me enough to go elsewhere from now on. Will they learn? I guess we’ll find out.
Have you considered the fact that it might just be spam mean’t to implicate unethical practices of the specific SEO firm? If the spammer (a potential, small time competitor) has emailed you and (most likely) a number of other people, then theres a growing chance that a ‘buying of text links’ report is going to end up getting sent to Google. Get a number of paid link reports from varied people and the SEO firm (which might have nothing to do with the emails being sent) will likely get smacked!
I appreciate that the email could be authentic and the reply to address could be false although it could as easily be some backhanded technique. Perhaps contact the firm direct and see if they can confirm the ip send data etc.
But if I contact them they will fix the guys address and he get more successful. I don’t want that happening really.
I’m 100% sure it’s genuine.
There are lots of other methods. May be he’s lucky enough posting on webmaster’s forums and working with his PM box.
And… don’t be so cruel.
Enough of the competitor sniping now patrick.
It started with moneyexpert and since then you have just turned into the internets Police.
Its very easy as we all know, to point links at our competitors then point it out to the Patrick Altofts of the world so we can all call for their public lynching.
Its a good blog when you dont turn it into a competitor witch hunt or some kind of bum kissing, point scoring debate.
If I wanted to make anything of this post then I would have named the companies involved. As it stands it’s a light-hearted look at how agencies sometimes get it wrong.
I think you’re endowing them with far too much intelligence. They’re no doubt using an SEO spambot to find sites and send out thousands of similar mail merged messages in the hope of getting links (I bet some naive webmasters add them without worrying about actually getting the fee up front). The fact that they got their own email address wrong is probably irrelevant to them.
Incidentally, is it Google suicide to include my URL in the website field in your comments form?
They are spammers, simple as.
The funny thing is that they are the ones making shed loads of money and getting link backs. If you sent out a million link back requests and 0.00001% accepted and set up the link it equates to a nice amount of links coming through to a site.
The funny thing about these kind of email requests either get accepted with will return a result to the spammer or they are ignored in which case more emails are obviously sent.
I don’t send spam emails or spammy link requests myself but looking into it from a business point of view I don’t see the downside to requesting links in this way.
It’s like cold calling, the more calls you make the more sales you get, I would say spam works in a very similar way.
These were certainly personalised emails only sent to me.
Patrick, I’ve got a question for you:
I recently received an email from a UK link broker (it may have been one of the ones you mentioned in this post; they claim on their web site to represent quite a few large companies). Normally, I wouldn’t pay attention to this type of email, but the site of mine they are interested in is just sitting around, so I wouldn’t mind making a little cash off of it.
My question is they said they are interested in paying an annual fee for a text link (I’m assuming in the sidebar of the site), and my question is what kind of figure should I tell them I expect? Since it’s an unsolicited offer, should I tell them a higher than normal rate?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Fair comments, who would you say was a reasonably priced company for SEO?
Branded3 are very good I hear
Link building can be tricky to master. You need to make clear, concise decisions about distributing links throughout your website. If you decide to purchase links off other websites, make sure that the website is relevant to your business. I agree with Richard’s comment – Link building companies – they charge outrageous prices for something the client should be learning about and doing themselves.
I think it is important that a business understands their website and researches other sites to get a knowledge of what techniques work and is cost effective.
Would love to know who the Leeds agency was, but guess I’ll never find out.
The fact that the emails are bouncing on the second example suggests that they’re using some system to send the emails out – realistically how long could your from email address be wrong for before you worked it out?