Not to turn this into a ‘black hat SEO’ versus’ white hat SEO’ argument, but won’t it, in the long run, be cheaper to have spent your SEO money on filling your site with relevant and long-tail content than swimming against the current, and investing in short-cuts the big G will eventually figure out and give you negative ranking for? How long do you think it will take the guys in Mountain View to figure out the domain buying game? Heck, I’d be surprised if they haven’t already and have plans in place to drop the hammer on offenders. I’d hate to be the SEO rep handling client emails the week G puts the smack down on folks who shelled out big money on expired domains!

Great article and thanks for recommending me to Kieran and Leo’s blogs, some great content on both sites.

Checking it out now – looks like you guys focus more on paid side, but no harm in reading that also

Rgds
Richard

If you are looking for new Irish guys blogging you could give my http://www.onlineadvertising.ie/blog a gander. It’s newish so still a bit raw. Any suggestions or feedback you may have would be mucho appreciated.

al

Thanks for the feedback / clarification.

Ricardo

I doubt I’d ever spend thousands of $ on an article per-se. I’m really referring to the creation of some top-notch content, perhaps based on research of some description. So the majority of the spend would be related to the collection and analysis of data. Another alternative, and often less expensive, is link-bait based on interesting content from around the web. I know a couple of guys who do this full-time and produce some really link-worthy content.

Rgds
Richard

But if you’ve got the dough, I see how it would be worth it.

Thanks for the tip(s).

Ricardo

Fixed now.

@Ricardo – maybe I’ve become lazy, but I really think creating great content and promoting it is the way forward. I think Rand put it well about spending a few thousand $ on some reat content that gets 100 links. That’s the way to go, and it doesn’t always need to be a few thousand $. The post I did in 2006 about AOL data still get’s links weekly, and I’d say it’s received hundreds of high quality links over time. It cost nothing but my time. Granted opps like that don’t come along every day, but I’d still look for industry-related opportunities like that if I were you.

@Cormac – thanks for commenting.

Rgds to all
Richard

Interesting article once again.

Got me thinking of SEOMoz’s recent article on paid links.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stance-on-paid-links-link-ads

What I understood from it (the SEOMoz one) is that paid links was, once upon a time, an actual strategy used in SEO? i.e. something done, then clamped down on by G – and, hence, the clamp-down as well by SEO professionals.

It seems many companies (e.g. the insurance industry which you mention here and in other posts) are still using this “strategy”.

What would you recommend as a basic link building strategy for small to medium businesses? (Not asking for any trade secrets here! – just a basic idea of what a small / medium sized business could / should do to build incoming links).

Kind Regards,
Ricardo

It’s interesting how well you can rise up the SERP’s just by having high PR links from totally unrelated sites. I am not too sure about the whole on theme links. As I said in the blog post, I have tested this on a couple of sites and ranked for a competitive keyword with totally unrelated (and spammy) links, before getting penalized for that keyword. Over optimisation of back links I think.

I would love to know how those sites are acquired (4ps.co.uk), are they just pinged when a domain is about to expire ?. I can’t see a local council selling off their site or who knows, maybe they need to during these recessionary times

Leo’s blog is great, nice to read from other people in Ireland on these topics.

Thanks