Links to possible rival sites in article - good or bad

[fonzerelli_79]

for one of my sites i have an article section. I have paid authors for some articles and have written others myself.

A site which isnt a direct rival as such (they are more of a directory site) has contacted me about them submitting an article with the premise that the article would have certain keywords link to their site (ive read about this before but i dont know the exact term for it)

for example

*keyword1* goes to: ...
*keyword2* goes to: ...
*keyword3 *goes to: ...
*keyword4*goes to: ...
*keyword5*goes to: ...

etc

The first article they submitted was less than 500 words and was terrible to be honest. I told them as much and told them i wouldnt put such a poor article on my site

Theyve since come back with a 2000+ word article and the quality is a lot better....they clearly want to get trade on

I would never ever consider doing this but they have said they will move my site from the links section from page 5 or 6 to page number 1. They are a very high traffic site so its swinging it for me.

I have some questions

* Does this kind of thing do more damage than good
* With a 2000 word average, how many links back to them would be ok and how many would be damaging.


As i said before, the main thing for me is getting my link much higher in their link directory as they already send me a little traffic on a poor traffic page. I can get articles like that written by someone else or do it myself - im just concerned this kind of thing can do more damage than good for seo purposes

im gonna try and give them an email back about it in the next day or so - any help or feedback on this would be greatly appreciated

thanks :):)

[Blue Cat Buxton]

The only concern I would have is relevancy of their site; you say they are not direct rivals, but as long as they are suitably on target it shouldn't hurt, particularly if there is upside for you from a link on their page 1

[Chris]

It more or less sounds like an in-content link exchange, which IMO is the best way to do them. You want to avoid spam though, so don't pepper it with too much links. Say no more than 1 link per paragraph or even better 1 link for every 2 paragraphs.

Also, double check the article for copyright (search for sentences on Google), to make sure they haven't just copied it from somewhere.

[KLB]

Copyscape (http://Copyscape.com ) is a good way to verify if an article is copied from another source.

[fonzerelli_79]

thanks for the response guys
(i would have replied sooner but i didnt get any email notices about it:))

the content is original. They have a few writers on their payroll to do this thing. I've checked various sentences and it all seems good

thanks for your help guys :)

[Johnny Gulag]

Copyscape (http://Copyscape.com ) is a good way to verify if an article is copied from another source.Seems to work. I just found a ebay auction where someone used one of my CD reviews to help promote the sale. Though they gave me credit in there, too bad they did not make the credit a link back to my site. :(

[Cutter]

I would never ever consider doing this but they have said they will move my site from the links section from page 5 or 6 to page number 1. They are a very high traffic site so its swinging it for me.

If you are going to give them anchor text links within an article they should be able to do the same for you.

[KLB]

Seems to work. I just found a ebay auction where someone used one of my CD reviews to help promote the sale. Though they gave me credit in there, too bad they did not make the credit a link back to my site. :(
I have a subscription to Copyscape and track dozens of pages on my site. Its great for tracking down plagiarism. :smash:

In fact just yesterday, I found what I think was a grad student's paper that had been published to the web as a PDF that had plagiarized at least eight distinct sections of one of my articles. I sent the professor in charge of the program the student's paper was written for and got a message back today from the professor that the paper had been removed from the site. I wasn't looking for removal of the paper, just proper citation, but I guess the Professor decided the paper didn't shouldn't be representing his program.