Sponsored Posts - What's Everyone's Thoughts?

[RMcdonald]

Having used a number of tactics over the years, I have always tried avoiding paying for links. Not that I feel there is anything wrong with it and I am sure there will be many of you who will jump in on this discussion.

The main reason behind this thread is to discuss what everyone has found with doing sponsored posts. Did you use them for brand awareness? Did you use them for helping your serp rankings?

What kind of an impact did you see?

And ultimately, Do you think it's worthwhile setting aside a budget to do sponsored posts?

Excited to see what everyone's thoughts are!

 

[Calamari]

I'm only doing a sponsored post if the site has a large audience and a real chance of sending me traffic.

There are plenty of websites that will accept great content for free so there's really no need to pay unless their site and their social accounts will send you immediate traffic that you can convert.

I do think it's worthwhile to pay for sponsored posts but the payoff has to be immediate, otherwise just spend the money on adwords.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you do a legitimate Sponsored Post and the links back to you are not nofollow, then you now are a link buyer. Enough times and Google can penalize you. They'll send you some examples of bad links and those may pop up.

I nearly always want my "guest posts" to be passed off as if the authors of the other site wrote it. I don't want an author box, I don't want links in an author box, I don't want it under any username like "guest authors," etc. I want it to totally fly under the radar and try to make that as clear as possible during the early communication.

But yeah, I'll take a Sponsored Post on a big site and attribute it to my site, because now we're talking about real marketing and getting eyeballs on your brand and building trust. In those cases I want the links nofollow'd. These are very valuable. Enough of this type of activity and you'll start to get a steady stream of regular users who share your posts on social media and forums and bring you up in discussions. That leads to big SEO victories.

 

[RMcdonald]

@Ryuzaki Well that really does help clear things up for sure!

Another question would be: Is it bad to do a few follow links for sponsored posts?

The reason I am asking, is that I am currently doing link building for eCommerce and the site is relatively new so still putting together some great content to reach out with and obviously info graphics too.

I've reached out to over 100 targets, with almost 30 of them coming back asking for payment and I am unsure as to how to proceed.

Wondered if you could share your thoughts on this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@RMcdonald, Think of it as a threshold value. I'm totally going to make up numbers, but it'll help illustrate how I think it works, in a simplified fashion.

Imagine there's some threshold value based on a percentage of your backlink profile. When you cross this threshold algorithmically, you may get hit or passed on for a manual review. Let's say this value is 10%, and that you have 100 backlinks total.

So your "I just tripped the radar" is when you get to your 11th bad backlink.

However, at such a low level, statistically you can't get confidence that this person is a spammer. So at such low levels of total backlinks you can get away with some stuff like dialing in 100% exact match anchors and getting some "iffy" links.

But let's talk about 1000 backlinks and a new 10% threshold value of 100 backlinks. If someone scores 100 iffy links, you have a much greater confidence that it's not by accident.

However, let's say your site is now 3 years old and has some authority and trust, which might move your threshold up to 20%. That's because you're also now a possible target for spam attacks and people sending PBN's your way, etc. So maybe you can now get away with 200 bad links with Google being willing to ignore and discount most of them.

I'd chew on that a while and see what kind of risk you're willing to assume.