Good evening tourism world….

I was delivering a 6h online marketing workshop for tourism in the Scenic Rim near Brisbane today and we briefly touched on the importance of link building (you can check out the slide I used)…

I always like to use examples of how UntangleMyWeb.com and many other businesses are often contacted by so called “SEO-companies” looking for links for their client’s sites so you can imagine how stoked I was to receive this email and have some fresh ammunition for the next workshop!

Email received from a rather ill-intentioned link building company

Hi

My name is Alice Cook. I’ve just visited your website untanglemyweb.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back from my Business and Marketing website which is http://www.freiker.biz/

As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site home page, not on any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure this exchange would be beneficial for both of our sites, helping towards increasing our visibility in search engines.

If you are interested, please add the following information to your website and kindly let me know when it’s ready. I’ll do the same for you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from your site.

Title: Broadcast Monitoring

URL: http://www.tnsmi.co.uk/our-expertise/media-monitoring/broadcast-monitoring.asp

Description: Track and monitor broadcast services to improve your business.

I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.

Best regards;

Alice Cook

Web Marketing Consultant

Now Alice, here is what I would like to tell you but instead of replying personally I thought that it would be more beneficial I share this with Australian tourism operators so they understand why this proposal is ridiculous.

Translation: What Alice Cook is asking

What our friend Alice is being paid is to do a link building strategy for TNS. Fair enough. However, she is trying to sound like she has got the greatest deal for me offering me an inbound link to UntangleMyWeb.com from this “Link Farm” site: http://www.freiker.biz/.Of course, TNSMI has no idea (I presume) about how that link has been found!

Even better (she thinks!) she is offering a link from the homepage, which would generally be more thought after when viewing the site I quickly realised that :

Fabie’s 2 second analysis

- the homepage of Freiker.biz has zero PageRank (value from n/a-10 that Google assigns to a webpage 10 being the best) … no wonder because

- the domain name (www.Freiker.biz) was created 7 days (yes DAYS) ago (that’s what I call a really fast turnaround Alice, I give it to you organisation is your strength!)

- the content is plagiarised from other sites (just google a few of their sentences and you will see what I mean)

- there are plenty of links at the bottom of the page

I could go on and on but I think you have got the gist of it! This Freiker site has been purely designed to attract gullible people (unlike me Alice, did you actually read what UntangleMyWeb.com was about before sending us your spam email?)

Who is getting the real benefit of the link here?

Now, needless to say that the link I would be getting from our friends at Freikr.biz wouldn’t benefit our website at all. However, in order to receive this link they are asking us to link to another site being http://www.tnsmi.co.uk/our-expertise/media-monitoring/broadcast-monitoring.asp.

TNS is a very renowned company and their TNS Media Intelligence is trying to improve the rankings of the broadcast-monitoring page of their website. What has happened is that they have hired Alice… Now, I am sure that TNS has done their research but the firm they hired to do their link building (aka Alice) isn’t the one we would, let’s say, “recommend” to our clients. Even though they are finding genuine links to TNS (UntangleMyWeb.com is a genuine company I would like to believe) their backend approach between Freiker and us is not genuine.

Alice, I give it to you, you are pretty good at something… and that is getting the job done for the client! Since UntangleMyWeb.com has got a PageRank of 4 I would give TNS a lot of my link-juice for nothing in return. After all, you are not trying to rip-off the client but you are definitely ripping off (or at least trying to) rip me off making me believe that your link would help my site… Now Alice, you really live in wonderland do you?

Summary to tourism operators about link building

• If you receive an email asking you for a link such as Alice’s put it in the bin. If it sound legitimate, just check out the PageRank, Domain name age of their website, just how I did it below.
• Ask yourself: would visitors to the site I am getting a link from (their target market) benefit from reading your content?
• If you are about to hire a link building consultant (so if you were to put yourself in the shoes of TNS here) why don’t you ask them to provide you a list of 3 sites they developed a link building strategy for and check the links they got using the Yahoo! LinkDomain command?…. Mind you, that wouldn’t be enough would it? If TNS was their client you would see a link form “our” website as a link (provided I was gullible), and you would think these guys are good and would have no idea about the black-hat SEO techniques going in the background!
• This is why you need to ask any potential web partner what their link building processes are and if they cannot give you the full low down I wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot barge pole.

Wanna learn more and avoid being taken for a ride?

There are great tutorials about SEO and Link Building in the Australian Tourism Ekit - they will give you enough short and sweet information to help you make informed decisions about your online strategy!