This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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My friend Travis Jamison (owner of Smash Digital, a link building agency where I used to work and that I recommend to those looking for serious backlinks) recently tweeted something that had me like:
If you are a seasoned link builder you’ll be able to relate.
And if not, this will be a quick lesson and a memorable illustration to help you avoid some real shitty links in the future:
As a good rule of thumb, any time you see an SEO pricing page that looks like this, you should run.
If you can pick the exact metric of your link, it's a shit link. If each post is exactly 500 words, it's a shit link
My Take:
Well, I already kind of gave my take above but…
Places that sell links with such specific pricing usually use sites that ONLY exist to sell links to agencies. Of course, there’s an exception to everything, but typically you’ll want to stay away from these kinds of sites.
If it’s easy to do, and anyone can do it… how valuable is it really?
The answer: if you’re the one buying these kinds of links at best they are worthless and Google will ignore them. At worst they are actively hurting your rankings.
If you’re the site selling 20 links/day $75-$205 a pop, it’s really valuable. A great short-term business model if you can get past the ethical turbulence of offering something without much value…
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Links, Resources, and Recommendations
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey sem@hey.com
PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? Inexplicably sticky? I’d love to hear from you (and thank you to those of you who read and responded already!)
PPS — I just saw a muskrat swimming through my pond. No big takeaway, just… pretty random and thought I’d share. Have you ever seen a muskrat before?
Muskrat are pretty cool. They are the sea otter of freshwater, and everyone loves otters.