Is this a good looking blog??

Recently I’ve come across several SEO marketing companies that use a network of blogs for increasing organic search engine rankings. When I say “recently,” I’m talking about the spring of 2008. While I don’t think this is a totally new concept, I’ve been surprised about some of the results these companies are showing and have been considering trying it myself.

First, I’ll explain how I came about this research. About two minutes after paying Yahoo! $299 for listing in their directory for one of my commercial sites, I was cold called by an SEO marketing firm. Granted, it wasn’t the standard obnoxious sales call, and I had a rather enlightening conversation for 30 minutes or so. I’m not going to pimp this company’s services in this post, as I haven’t decided if I’m going to try working with them yet or not. But I have to say that I was fairly intrigued.

The company has a network of almost 2,000 bloggers that get paid for writing “reviews” about certain products or websites. And I put the “reviews” in quotes on purpose, as they really can’t be called reviews. What they do accomplish is getting a link with very specific keywords in the anchor text. Of course, this is ultimately a paid link, as the company charges their clients a monthly fee, the SEO firm pays the bloggers (I’m assuming $10-15 per post), and in the end it’s a three-way transaction.

Now as this was a pretty expensive service (about $600-$1200 per month) I needed to do a little more research to see how effective this is for the firm’s clients. Not that I’m too cheap, but my commercial sites just don’t have that kind of money to experiment with every month. I was able to dig up a few examples of their clients without too much difficulty. And so far I’ve been a little surprised that it seems to be working so well. I’ll follow this with an example below.

The keywords they were getting good rankings with were fairly competitive. Their clients weren’t huge multi-million dollar businesses, but the ones I checked did have decent looking websites- meaning they didn’t look like they were designed in 1996 with frames and animated gifs.

Now here’s what made me a little leary. The blogs the posts came from don’t appear to carry much weight in the Google PR and Alexa Rank world. And in some cases the writing wasn’t very good and was hardly relevant to the site they were linking to. So how does this work? I’m not completely sure. Take a look at the below example.

Here’s a snippet from a blog at gwapasila.bravejournal.com. Now the writing in this case isn’t too bad and it seems fairly relevant. But it is obvious to a live person that it was written for SEO purposes.

If you’re planning for a vacation and looking for a comfortable place to stay in then Branson hotels is the best choice for you. They can provide you with a distinctive accommodations and top notch amenities. It’s perfect place…

I’ve underlined the keyword that was used for the link (branson hotels). Then I searched Google for this term and sure enough, the site that paid for this link showed up on the front page (in this case, it was thousandhills.com. Then another Google search using link:thousandhills.com shows a few other blogs that are obviously part of the same campaign.

I guess what I really want to know is how does this work? The primary blogs doing this have a PR of nothing and most have no Alexa rank as well. And how many (seemingly insignificant) links like this does it take to get a site to the front page? And if it’s only a handful, can a site owner buy a few domains, put up quick blogs and start linking with this anchor text strategy?

For the $1,200 a month this SEO firm charges, they do promise 50 links a month. Now for the same $1,200 I could buy a lot of domains, put up a lot of blogs, and write a lot of posts. I don’t know how effective this strategy would be as all the new sites would have no search engine weight but over time they might.

Anyone have any experience with this or any thoughts? It’s an interesting study.