More Newspapers Selling Links

Sigh…. I’d kind of hoped that I wouldn’t have to write about this topic again, after my recent experiences about Newspapers selling links after February’s BrightonSEO mini-conference. This was a day of SEO & Internet Marketing talks and where we had a final presentation from a gentleman named Paul, a self confessed “blackhat SEO” offering us SEO advertising opportunities in major and regional newspapers in the UK and USA. Many attendees had known about this for some time in advance, and had all signed a non disclosure agreement to not discuss this in public, something that I wasn’t bound by.

Surprisingly for me, this was picked up by the mainstream media, and a number of phone calls to and from the Guardian Media ensued with them grilling me for additional information (which I didn’t have at the time) about this topic. They were absolutely adamant that they were not part of the scheme mentioned at BrightonSEO, and eventually, after a week of discussions, published “Can Selling Links Save Newspapers“.

Oh the irony – in the comments of the blog, the Guardian were seen to be selling links too and called on it in the comments of the article – particularly Money Supermarket was cited as an example of a site being linked to. It may have been out of ignorance that these were passing link juice as they claimed, but these were not linking within the body copy as per the articles thrust, which is what was being suggested we would likely be offered at the BrightonSEO.

But they certainly seemed to be bought links – perhaps for the intention of traffic, as they did appear in “sponsored” areas, but there wasn’t much to prevent these passing on link equity to the sites they linked to.

We have also in the past, been approached by the Trinity Mirror PLC, who offered to sell us links on some regional newspapers, listing 14 sites, all PR 5-6 at the time, that they would be prepared to sell links to us from, and providing examples of sites that were also already buying links from them. This would have cost us £1000 + VAT for 10 articles on 10 of those websites – with the potential for discounts should we wish to commit to a fixed number of articles.

I said at the time of us receiving this, that the examples that they supplied were not particularly good – and didn’t lead me to believe that we would get a good return on the investment required. I checked rankings for the sites that they provided rankings for, and for the most part, didn’t find them ranking for phrases within the top 100 positions that they were looking to target here, except for some really niche terms, that to be honest, I think rankings would have been achieved for without any links, let alone such costly ones.

Again though, similarly to the examples mentioned in the Guardian comments, a key detail here compared to what was discussed at BrightonSEO was that these were not going to be links within the copy – these were links that were tagged with “further information” and appeared in a way that was not too dissimilar to a blogroll link. But these were links that were not talking about traffic that could be generated as a result – in fact no mention is made of traffic at all, whilst “SEO Benefits” is mentioned frequently.

So – on to what has made me pick this topic up again – yesterday I saw reports from the Further blog, that the Express Group was contacting SEOs to sell links. I arrived at work early this morning to find that we had received the same offer.

This was different to the examples from Trinity Mirror group and the Guardian, in that they were offering links in the body copy of a page, and charging £1000 per article (mind you, you still have to supply the copy and images) – the copy of the email we received is below:
Afternoon

You may be interested to know, here at the ‘Express Group’ we have started to integrate SEO advertorials amongst our news articles across our three main sites – Daily Express (http://express.co.uk/) Daily Star ( http://www.dailystar.co.uk) and OK ( http://ok.co.uk/)

The SEO Advertorials run in a prominent position on a selected channel homepage (IE: Fashion) for a two week/one month period and then are archived for over 15 months.

For SEO benefits, we ask you to highlight terms you wish to use as external text links and supply destination URL for each highlighted term to and ensure the title of the article has good SEO benefits as this will be picked up in search engine

We ask for you to supply, 250-500 words of content and supporting images.

Advertorials start at £1,000 per article but am happy to negotiate on bundle deals.

EXAMPLES

Fashion – http://ok.co.uk/posts/view/15091/Wallis-Winter-Wonderland

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/158965/Ahead-of-the-curve

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/starfun/view/118129/Sexy-shopping-for-the-shy/

Money – http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/153004/Need-a-loan-Read-this-first

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/cashpoint/view/121665/Money-saving-tips-for-new-parents/

http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/158317/How-paying-voluntary-excess-car-insurance-can-lower-your-premiums

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/motoring/view/122379/-Is-your-car-an-object-of-desire-/

http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/157108/A-guide-to-working-from-home

Retail – http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163068/Laptops-Buying-Guide-Things-You-Need-To-Know
Travel – http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163077/A-hotel-stay-in-a-UK-Town-can-help-you-save-your-pennies-

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163093/-Is-the-South-West-still-best-for-self-catering-holidays-

Food – http://www.ok.co.uk/food/view/18960/Buy-Wine-Online-through-Wine-Clubs/

http://www.ok.co.uk/food/view/17894/Get-excited-about-food-again-with-free-online-recipes/

Motoring – http://www.dailystar.co.uk/style/view/125428/Aspiring-models-to-grasp-fast-track-opportunity-with-both-hands/

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163093/-Is-the-South-West-still-best-for-self-catering-holidays-

This has got a large amount of the SEO community once again discussing this topic, and on Twitter this morning, there has been lively debate, which has in some respects questioned my perception on what constitutes a paid link. My initial thoughts were about intent and perception as to what constitutes a paid link that breaches the Google TOS were questioned by others.

My thinking on purchasing a link has been that if you are buying a link for the purpose of gaining traffic from that source, it’s generally going to be ok from an SEO perspective. However, is the time and effort that is put in to writing articles and guest blog posts, to supply to gain links back from other sources really a “free” link (thanks to Matt Davies for questioning me on this). You’ve invested time (and therefore money either directly or indirectly), and the sites that you supply that content too, get page views, ad impressions and potential revenue as a result of people clicking on those adverts. Whilst not “paid” linking by the conventional thinking (or perhaps, rather my perception), I think Matt made a good point about this.

Buying links in all likelihood isn’t going away any time soon – predominantly because it works, at least at the start. Google talks a good game on hitting those that sell links where it hurts, so it will be interesting to see if the Express Group loses it’s ability to pass on link equity from those £1k a pop articles.