Soliciting Product Reviews with Free Samples?
-
I have been looking at my competitors links and I have discovered that a competitor with top positions in the SERPs has been gaining links by offering free product samples to bloggers in exchange for links within the review back to their site.
My question is, does Google frown on this? Can it invoke a penalty? To me it seems tantamount to buying links, but yet his results speak for themselves. It is something I intend to start doing myself if I am sure it won't result in a penalty.
Thanks.
-
Hi,
Whether you report this or not is up to you - there's always been a lot of debate in SEO circles about whether it's a good idea to do this or not but the end of the story is pretty much that it's up to you.
The technical answer to the question is that yes, soliciting links with products is directly frowned upon. Plenty of people still basically do this but in a more subtle manner, where they are "developing a relationship" first, often not directly asking for a link. Products for publicity is an ancient trick which Google won't get rid of, but they definitely can and do say that they aren't happy with a direct exchange.
-
<this is="" a="" rant="" from="" blogger="" who="" gets="" solicited="" lot....="" maybe="" there="" nugget="" here="" to="" help="" you="" understand="" what="" some="" bloggers="" might="" think="" about="" these="" solicitations=""></this>
I have people wanting to send me free stuff to write a review for them.
They must think that I have nothing on the schedule here. Most bloggers who have any audience at all have a lot more interesting stuff to write about instead of your product. The things that I write about instead of your product are probably going to make me a lot more money. They are the topics that my readers want to hear about.
The largest group are people who want to send me a cheap product, expect me to try it and then shill it to the people who visit my site and subscribe to my feed. I am not going to be your mule. Honestly, if I filled my feed with a bunch of product reviews all of my visitors will stop visiting and all of my subscribers will unsubscribe.
Shilling your product is dangerous to my success.
So, I am not going to write about your product. If you want to reach my readers just buy adsense that is site targeted at my domain or ask about how much it costs to have the rectangle ad on the right side of all of my articles. It is going to cost a lot more than the product sample that you thought you would send me.
Any blogger who has a worthwhile audience is not going to write an article for your product sample. He isn't. The economics are not there. He is going to spend his time writing about the stuff that brings visitors to his site. Blathering about your product is not going to go down well with his visitors. He would be burning their patience.
Most bloggers with a worthwhile audience are just going to tell you.... Here are our advertising rates. You can have the rectangle on the right side of all of our article pages for $15,000 per month.
-
Agreed.
-
I find this one of google's many extremely vague guidelines that sounds clear, but in reality, is not at all. You can't exchange "a free product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link." Which, to me sounds like, "you can't give someone a sample and they agree to write about it and link to you." That parts clear. What's not clear, is whether or not you can send a blogger a free product, and hope they write about/link to it. If I had to argue it, I'd say you definitely can or google would have written differently to include the latter specifically.
Lots of bloggers are known for their reviews. It seems natural that they get sent products, especially new releases and review them in their blogs. If they only went out and reviewed the products they bought themselves, they probably wouldn't have a whole lot of content. So, sending them free products should be completely fine. The problem stems from what comes next.
1. How did you "discover" your competitor was doing this? (that's rhetorical) I just want to think about if how you discovered it and if it was something Google could discover itself. If it is, you definitely shouldn't do it.
2. Have you tried just sending out free samples to bloggers? If you're doing this primarily for SERPs, and not for the bloggers' fan base, then you don't need him/her to review 50 products to get you 50 links. Really, the first one (or few) are what provide you most of the SEO benefit. If you send someone twenty five free samples (with no strings attached), they probably will write about at least one (though, to be fair, I can't say for certain that's true). Also, you can look through the comments on the blogger's site, and find someone mentioning your product or something like your product, and then you could send your free sample with a screenshot of the comment. This would show that the blogger's community wants to know about your product, and you did some research.
3. If you're still going to do some sort of 'review my product for links" official deal, then I'd at least over send the blogger products and keep records of it. Maybe, if you get flagged by google, but you show only 4% of the products you sent out ever got reviewed, they might believe you were sending out samples legitimately...but I doubt it.
Good luck!
Ruben
-
I guess that would be your decision. I have in some instances reported violations, although they were not always heeded. If you wish to report them then here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1 is the best place to do so.
-
This begs the question, should i report my competitor who has achieved terrific results with this method?
-
Taken from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to deal with product mark up automatically generated by Yoast?
Let's assume there's a website for nursery. Now they have listed plants and trees as their product now yoast is generating product structured data because of that search console is reporting errors in markup says "Either "offers", "review", or "aggregateRating" should be specified" Reviews can be fixed because of genuine reviews and ratings but trees doesn't have sku, gtin8, gtin13, gtin14 or mpn" so we can't add this information. Because of this every product listing shows an error in structured data. What's the possible fix to get rid of these errors? **Note: I tried using snip to override Yoast Schema but using another plugin is not the first choice. **
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Excluding Googlebot From AB Test - Acceptable Sample Size To Negate Cloaking Risk?
My company uses a proprietary AB testing platform. We are testing out an entirely new experience on our product pages, but it is not optimized for SEO. The testing framework will not show the challenger recipe to search bots. With that being said, to avoid any risks of cloaking, what is an acceptable sample size (or percentage) of traffic to funnel into this test?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
How does google know if rich snippet reviews are fake?
According to: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews - all someone has to do is add in some html code and write the review. How does google do any validation on whether these reviews are legitimate or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke0 -
Does Lazy Loading Create Indexing Issues of products?
I have store with 5000+ products in one category & i m using Lazy Loading . Does this effects in indexing these 5000 products. as google says they index or read max 1000 links on one page.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Duplicate content for product pages
Say you have two separate pages, each featuring a different product. They have so many common features, that their content is virtually duplicated when you get to the bullets to break it all down. To avoid a penalty, is it advised to paraphrase? It seems to me it would benefit the user to see it all laid out the same, apples to apples. Thanks. I've considered combining the products on one page, but will be examining the data to see if there's a lost benefit to not having separate pages. Ditto for just not indexing the one that I suspect may not have much traction (requesting data to see).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SSFCU0 -
Ecommerce Products on Homepage
Hi, If we highlight products on homepage, they rank better as they are linked to from the homepage - we cannot increase the amount of products or links on homepage for dilution reasons. So, if we change the products on homepage for some others, presumably those will get the link juice benefit? I think what I am asking is, is there any "longevity" once the product has been removed from the homepage as a link - will it lose it's "priority value" or will it retain some of it's importance after the homepage link has been removed? If that is the case, I could circulate my products via homepage over a course of time to help them all get some benefit no? Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Blogger Reviews w/ Links - Considered a Paid Link?
As part of my daily routine, I checked out inbound.org and stumbled upon an article about Grey Hat SEO techniques. One of the techniques mentioned was sending product to a blogger for review. My question is whether these types of links are really considered paid links. Why shouldn't an e-commerce company evangelize its product by sending to bloggers whose readership is the demographic the company is trying to target? In pre e-commerce marketing, it was very typical for a start-up company to send samples for review. Additionally, as far as flow of commerce is concerned, it makes sense for a product review to direct the reader to the company, whether by including a contact phone number, a mailing address, or in today's e-commerce world, a link to their website. I understand the gaming potential here (as with most SEO techniques, black-hat is usually an extreme implementation), but backlinks from honest product reviews shouldn't have a tinge of black, thus keeping it white-hat. Am I wrong here? Are these types of links really grey? Any help or insight is much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b40040400