Recently, a client of mine received an email from a “Professional Link Building” company (who shall remain nameless) for some business opportunities. It seems that they were searching for a rather long tail keyword (including a city and state that really has nothing to do with my client) and when they came across the site, they sent a note saying they could get them ranked #1 for this term.
I was really intrigued by this email, so I started to do a bit of research. I found several mistakes within the email that no link building company / team should make.
1. The long-tail keyword. It isn’t relevant and it shows me that they have no idea what the business goals of my client are.
2. They own 1000s of Web sites and get you 100s of links. Wow, if that isn’t SPAM and black hat, I don’t know what is.
3. They make mention of “ALL your keywords” but don’t list any of them out. Again, no idea of business goals and certainly not demonstrating any interest in finding them out.
4. They’re sending it to my client’s competitors. Scare tactics don’t work. What if more than one in a set agrees to the services and you’ve promised them “top rankings” for the same keyword? What happens then?
5. I searched “professional link building” and they are nowhere to be seen.
6. Their site isn’t even optimized. Yet they hammer on about “doing all the things the search engines love” to rank. Build links but screw the rest of SEO?
When it was all said and done, we all had a good laugh about it. Then we went back to building links the right way.
