As my regular readers know, I do like to poke fun at my competition. My main competitor, Rentals.com, has purchased links in the past, so what better way to highlight this than with a video where RentVine.com is the Mac guy and Rentals.com is the PC guy in an Apple commercial.
Since I only work on my site part time and I am much smaller than Primedia (company that owns Rentals.com), I can not afford to buy links to keep up with them. I also can’t afford to spend expensive SEO consulting fees, and I brew my own marketing efforts.
In terms of the paid links debate, I have to stand by Google on this issue. I am persuaded by Matt Cutts who over and over has talked about leveling the playing field for the small guy like me who can’t afford to purchase links.
I think purchasing links can produce some really bad content. Reading through 200 words of a pay per post about rentals.com recently was really hard because you could just hear the author saying, “Oh, only 40 more words to go to get my $11 bucks, what kind of fluff can I say about them now?” I even wrote the author and he agreed with me.
I know paid links will not go away, but I like the fact that Google is looking out for the small guy and will help my efforts in competing with big sites.
I think your view point can be affected by where you sit. For instance:
- if you are an SEO and have clients, buying links can be a quick way to get your client ranked and make you look good. [SEO’s are pro paid links]
- if you work for a large company that has a large advertising budget, buying links is easy thing to do [Pro paid links]
- if you are a small mom and pop site buying links to keep up with large companies is too expensive [against paid links].
(Special thanks to my friend Dave Besnette for the voice of the PC guy.)
Related Articles
2 users responded in this post
[...] in seeing another video on paid links I did [...]
Paid links don’t cause bad content, they just over expose that bad content, much like over optimizing for search engines.
Leave A Reply