Social Media linking: Unethical or just good business
Posted by Jeremy on 13 Jan 2008 at 12:31 pm | Tagged as: Social Networking, Link Building
Post Contributed by Jeremy Rivera
Quality links are becoming more and more important in the search engines. Almost every blog I read is talking about the importance of links and the anchor text being used on those links.
I own a website in a specific “vertical” and I was struggling to find ways to creatively get One Way In Bound Links. The difficulty is that most local people that I might get a link from that have a website want to make it a reciprocal link and I don’t have the budget to pay for directory links.
So, after some bumping around, I stumbled on a previous post on how social networking is becoming more important than search engines in terms of traffic.
I decided that I would create a profile for each of the Social Networks I could find and then link to every one of my pages with great anchor text and descriptions.
A few weeks later I checked my Google SiteMap for this site and saw that those links were listed as In Bound Links, and the anchor text also showed up in my “How other sites are linking to you” section.
I believe that it gave me a good boost in my reach for relevancy. But I can’t help but feel conflicted. I mean, as the owner of the site, it seems somewhat fraudulent to go to these social media sites, and create profiles just to promote my site. It seems like it might be something sneaky and underhanded that might even be considered “Gray Hat”.
I brought this up with a friend who was well versed in many different tactics in the search engines and he gave me some advice. He said:
If you think about it in those terms then most techniques used by SEO experts are “Gray Hat”.
I’m still not 100% convinced that it isn’t all on the up and up, but I can’t deny the benefits… What are your thoughts? Is it unethical to create your own social media profiles on social bookmark sites just to boost your quality links?
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I love your thoughts. They are what many of us have thought about ever since blogs started getting spammed by the link dropping of others. Think about it this way; if you drop your link on someone else’s website, is that a vote from that website? If you answer no, that probably means that Google is NOT going to continue counting those types of links. They just can’t. It’s not a vote by any stretch of the imagination. You are thinking very correctly in that it actually seems kind of sleazy what is going on in the SEOsphere these days.
Jeremy,
I hear you about the conflict. When you have a new site, it sometimes takes “self promotional” social media linking to get some traction. When it comes to the ethics of this, I think it all comes down to how you contribute to the social network you’re using. By taking the time to create a profile and review other’s links as well, you’ll be adding value to the network you’re benefiting form.
Justin
I didn’t vote. I think the answer to your question may be two fold. Did you place the link for the SEs or did you do it for traffic.
In regard to ethics I think that becomes a matter of motive in some cases.
Two people may use the same technique, but one is a spammer, and the other is using the tecnique ethically.
My question would be is there any value to “Social Media Links” for conversions.
Doug,
I agree that there is a lot of “static” that comes from site owners and SEOers checking their site and self promoting. This static is not only limited to the sphere of social bookmarking but also to search traffic itself. It’s pretty well known that if a niche keyword is showing unusually high traffic then a site owner is most likely very OCD about checking stats. I definitely think that GYM will be taking more measures in the future to control the impact of social media links.
Justin,
I think that you have a good point, and I totally feel you on the “traction” part. You are certainly adding value to their network by writing content, while providing good anchor text for yourself. Maybe it would be a good idea to see it as a symbiotic relationship. Social media sites need users to input, but users need some sort of benefit…
Connie,
I just finished Aron Wall’s SEO Book today and he regards “ethics” as a dead phrase, and states that it’s better to think in terms of effective vs ineffective and also in terms of risk. To answer the last question, is there value for these types of links for conversions, I believe that they do have intrinsic value above that of getting the link juice. Most social media sites have a main thread or “recent posts” section where ALL submissions get displayed. This puts your link on a high PR page with potentially thousands of viewers. If your site is quality, then you’ll get positive mention, exposure, possible linking from other sites who find you there. So aside from the link value, there are benefits…
In general I think that like any “new phase” of the internet, social media and especially bookmarking, have the capacity to implode, and become saturated with people who are exploiting it… Question is to site owners - is it simple participation or exploitation?
I decided that my vote would go towards this tactic being spam only if it is the only thing you do. Creating an account and adding a link to the profile and then leaving the account to sit there without any further interaction is in my opinion a very spam worthy approach to link building.
Now on the flip side, if you create an account and participate within that social network then I would say that this approach is perfectly fine because you are a contributing user to that network or multiple networks.
It only makes sense to me that if you are contributing to a social network and building it up that it rewards you with either a little link love, traffic or both.
From an SEO point of view, regardless if it is white hat, gray hat or black hat; search engines don’t penalize a site for who they are getting a link from. If it were that easy then we would all be paying big bucks for link building on behalf of our competitors and they would most likely be returning the favor.
I’ll confess that I am the friend who told him that if he considered that practice gray hat then just about everything an SEOer does would be considered a little shady since we are always trying to get better rankings within the SERPs.
Back in August I wrote a post titled, “Social Networking & Link Building“. Might be worth a read as it somewhat relates to this topic.
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
You’re all ruining the internet!