I'd want to know exactly where the links are going to be.

I don't think you can buy enough quality links with a one time payment of $500 to make a difference. If you can, sign me up!

It sounds like he just plans to buy as many blog/comment spam links as he can. If it happens to work, he gets more money. If it doesn't work, whatever.

lol yeah, then you'd have no incentive to pay him for his services. Top 4 for poker coaching is pretty good given that CR, LP and the others are well established sites with lots of natural backlinks. I don't know Bullitos' site though and if he's guaranteed Top 4 then I bet it's already established as well.

Knowing where the links will be won't remove the incentive to have his services paid for (unless he's injecting links onto .edus or something weird)

if he's white hat, he's going to be writing people asking for links, linking on his own properties, setting up guest posts for you, finding relevant paid directory type places, building profiles/companion sites, help you create linkbait, lots of legwork type stuff, etc.

if he's blackhat he will probably be autogenning a bunch of stuff and has software, servers and techniques that bullitos likely can't deploy himself. so telling the customer that it's going to be comment and forum spam shouldn't be a problem. and if the guy is just going to one of the text link brokers and spending 500 bucks on one keyword for the hopes of earning the bonuses for first page and top 4 then his service is **** and you can in fact do that yourself easily.

there is even a chance that this guy will take the initial 500, spend 400 of it on links to have 100 bucks of risk free money, and then just freeroll the possibility that bullitos makes it high in the rankings.

cliffs: regardless of white or blackhat he should be able to describe his methods and where the links are going to be without compromising the value of his services.

He said, "I want to know exactly where the links are going to be" which seemed to imply the sites that he'd be trying to get links from. That definitely devalues his service and lowers the incentive to pay for it. Obviously explaining the link strategy is standard and expected.

I also wouldn't call a spinning/directory service "black hat" while calling paid link exchanges white hat. In Google's eyes, creating any type of links yourself is illegal, they just don't care since it's impossible to regulate.

Anyway, my overall point is that paying someone to do SEO and trying to have them explain their strategy to you, in detail, kind of defeats the purpose for them. I'm not going to tell someone how to get a Top 4 ranking in detail when that's the secret sauce they're paying me for.

I had actually written a lot more but felt it was a little tl;dr.

I was going to write about my own experience with buying links and how my site fell from #4 to #8. I ended up with a bunch of very poor quality links that I can't remove.

I decided to condense most of what I had written to that first line because I cant be 100% sure that was the reason for the decline and to avoid being too critical of what this guy is offering. I do get the feeling that he's freerolling though.

I mainly wanted to get the point across to ask questions. Don't pay for poor quality links.

My site is actually not really established.. However it's really relevant for the term 'pokercoaching' since it offers solely personal poker coaching from a lot of established poker coaches. Our SEO guy has also written some content for us and seems to be really interested to make this project a success so I actually think he will use a 'white-hat' strategy because he wants to be in it for the long term. I absolutely do not want to run the risk of being penalized by google, this would be a disaster ofcourse.

What I take from you guys is this:

- He should be able to explain his link strategy (however doesn't need to be in exact details since this obv makes his services less valuable).

- Google won't be penalizing paid links almost ever since it's a lot of work to track it?

- However I have to make sure his links are valuable and not crappy 1000 links packages and stuff.

Let's say he will use a legit strategy, $2000 for top4 seems to be a fair price right? Assuming it will be very tough to do it ourselves with no experience vs. sites like LP and CR.

A payment schedule which might get him to freeroll less could be better. Like paying $1000 when we hit the first page in a legit way and another $1000 for top 4.

PS. It would be great if any of you guys would like to take a look and maybe give some tips on how to improve my site if you have some spare time left. You can just PM me and I'll give you the URL.

Google absolutely knows how to penalize links. Google also has ways of figuring out if you paid for links (BMW, JC Penny etc and more have been caught).
You either trust your SEO or you dont, dont give $2000 to someone you dont trust. I looked at the SERP for "poker coaching" it is certainly not easy. $2000 would be 50 hours of work if he valued his time at $40/hour (a good SEO contractor would charge around this although it may be different outside the US). The the 5th result in the SERP had 20 linking domains minimum to even compete with older more credible domains, fairly good links. So he needs to get about 20 fairly good links in 50 hours assuming he doesnt use any of the money for link buying? Color me skeptical.

Thanks cwar! Do you guys know any respectable SEO contractors who have knowledge/connections in the poker world? (PM me if you do?)

I don't feel like digging up the rules, but I'm pretty sure that making your own links is legitimate, it just can't be some automated spam process for the purpose of boosting your rankings. From what I've seen when google posts from their blog (blogspot.com domain) and links to google.com or google.org (philanthropic arm) they don't use nofollow. Same goes for sites like doubleclick that they have acquired in the past.

edit: also bullitos, he should absolutely be able to tell you where the links are after he makes them. sure there are backlink checkers, but its better to see a real list and how many are getting indexed etc.

Dealer Dan/Graeme (affiliate bible) is the man. Met him a few times at affiliate conferences in Europe. He actually did a guest post for me at my former company. Their blog is really good too.

I also reccomend checking out Mike Jackness's blog. Mike was the founder of Protos Marketing (thisisthenuts, pokernewsdaily, PocketFives,BonusWhores). Mike is no longer in the gaming industry but he is a power player in niches outside of poker.

Buying links in the poker industry is fairly common. I'm not endorsing it, just stating a fact. When I was in the industry we never bought links (we were the exception). Unless you have a ton of money to spend on buying links or you are competing for niches/long tail terms, I advise against it. The ROI just isn't there imo.

Don't game the system. Provide quality content and provide value...the traffic will come. Keep in mind, depending on your monetization efforts, organic traffic may not be that valuable in terms of revenue. Organic Rakeback traffic, for example, is pretty terrible.

Keep in mind, the best SEO's in the industry work for the majors (Stars/Party) OR they are affiliates themselves. I do know a few independent contractors who are stand up guys and provide good work. PM me your skype and I can put you in touch with a few guys i know.

I strongly suggest to be very wary of any SEO. Ask lots of questions. Demand to see their previous work. Have someone who knows their stuff sift through the backlink profile of the SEO's work. If the SEO insists on buying links, that should be a red flag.

In regards to SEO strategy for you coaching site, i suggest writing guest blog posts for links back to your site. Write strategy articles for a poker news site in exchange for links. Not only will it help to improve your ranking...but the traffic coming from those links will actually be in your demographic (as oppose to links from travel websites).

Thanks a lot Bevo, I sent you a PM.

Bullitos, your site will not be penalized for having crap links. Otherwise, people would simply buy crap links to their competitors, the competitors would get penalized, and they would consequently be left to rank higher... Crap links just don't do anything positive, as far as people can tell, and if a nobody site comes along and all the sudden gets a ton of crap links it may be in google limbo for a while as google tries to figure out if the site is legit or not.

Additionally, with a lot of these ranking services the links that initially get you to the top become less valuable, and your site will loose it's top status just as quickly as it gained it. (Let's say initially your site was linked by 100 top PR blog pages, but now a week later all these links are moved to archives of those sites and those links are no longer that good... your site rank will also go down.)

***

IMO, instead of hiring these SEO kids from India or whatever, you are much better off hiring a semi decent kid and just telling him what to do... and building your back links naturally that way.

That's a statement no SEO really knows to be true (or false). Matt Cutts will tell you crap links will hurt you (of course whether or not to believe Matt Cutts is a different conversation all together).

JC Penny's was penalized for shady link building practices



Lot's of crap links in the beginning of a site's inception in the serps can get you sandboxed.

There's a difference between linking to helpful information and linking to your site from others with specific anchor text that is designed to game the system and increase your rankings. They want all of a sites links to be other sites genuinely recommending it.

No they don't. Well only manually. If it's a competitive niche a site is more likely to get reported and manually slapped. But it's not in an algorithm checking every site. Can you expand? I mean think about it. And if they had ways of "figuring it out" how would one explain the sites that still have paid links being first page? Those slaps were all manual.

Someone in SEO I trust who is on webmasters.stackexchange.com says you want to avoid linking into "bad neighbourhoods".

Yes, the same goes for building a house. Don't build your foundation on a pile of ****.

How many global monthly searches would we need to make it worthwhile for a two word phrase using the AdWords tool?

Alright, I'm jumping in feet first with a domain I've had for a year or so, but never did anything with.

www.nofaultinsurancemichigan.com

My goal is to put together 10-20 pages of content a week. I'm baffled on the backlinks portion though. I signed up for yahoo answers and pimped it that way 5 times today. What/where else should I be setting up backlinks?

Ignore the site look/feel at this point. I'm more concerned with putting up content and building the backlinks for the pagerank than I am making it look pretty.

Anyone have any ideas for good non-saturated niches these days? I've got one furniture site, one site about an asian celeb, and am going to do a coupon site. However, I'd like to start trying a few other niches just to see where I can hit but a lot of the more popular ones seem too difficult like dating, relationships, self-help, online business, etc.

Get links from high value domains, from high value pages. Anything you can write yourself typically will be discounted heavily (or not counted). No way to fake this, its hard work and it always is. Even if you purchase links its going to take some research.

I know you said not to comment on the design, but I can't help it, you need to change it. Anyone thinking about linking to you will be put off by it.

Yes, change the site to a WordPress installation and use the default theme (Twenty Ten). It will look 100x times better and will be easier to manage, read and navigate.