Guest Post
Overview: £500 for 20 links.
One day I thought it would be worth checking out if these link building companies are worth the money at all. I wasn’t overly confident but I thought if I try it once and it works, I can keep repeating and if it is useless, then I’ll only have made the mistake once. Unfortunately that seemed to be the only option I had as asking for a review of such a company would return only glowing, obviously affiliated, reviews. It seems they make such a fat profit; they can afford to pay their affiliates £250 per sale.
I chose Smart Traffic because they were number 1 in Google for “SEO company” so they must know what they’re doing.
If I was going to test it, I might as well test it properly so I opted to pay £500 for 20 links to be built over a month. I assumed at this price they would be good quality links. I was pretty angry when I saw my bank statement and they had charged £575. Apparently they aren’t legally required to state the amount including VAT when they usually deal business to business. Still I’ve never dealt with anyone else that would omit such a detail. A pretty low sales tactic if you ask me.
My site was very new and targeting a pretty easy keyword “Timberland Work Boots”. Surely spending that much money in links will get me into the top 5 in Google at the very least I thought. They never told me where the links came from for some reason (well I assume to make it harder for people to see how crap they are) but I found them using backlink tools.
Here’s an example of one of the sites my link appears on www.tiesntags.co.uk. The homepage has a PR of 1. According to Google, the site has 93 pages. Most of those pages contain a couple of paragraphs of text then around 25 external links. A site with a homepage PR of 1 containing barely anything but hundreds of outbound links is going to be no good to anyone.
Here's the sort of links you'll be receiving. They don't look awful, but when you consider the site is mostly made up of these and has a PageRank of 1, it's useless.
And here's how you navigate to those pages. Obviously lots of pages with lots of links and barely any real content.
Even worse, I was offered “high quality” links where the link would be included as part of a review. Contextual links are much stronger links in general but with Smart Traffic they cost around 5 times as much and the links come from this same useless type of site. I’m glad I didn’t order any of them, but I feel sorry for anyone that has.
Let’s see how this “link building” work affected my search ranking. I had done no link building myself but since the keyword wasn’t competitive, I was already on page two in Google (proving it shouldn’t take much to get a high rank). Smart Traffic’s link building campaign began in at the start of May and lasted till the end of the month.
| 28-Apr | 29-Apr | 30-Apr | 04-May | 14-May | 18-May | 21-May | 23-May | 29-May |
| 18 | 20 | 17 | 26 | 35 | 27 | 10 | 25 | 58 |
| 01-Jun | 07-Jun | 11-Jun | 18-Jun | 20-Jun | 24-Jun | 28-Jun | 01-Jul | 03-Jul | |
| 55 | 179 | - | 102 | 194 | 151 | 156 | 154 | 95 |
There you can see that when Smart Traffic started link building for this keyword, my site’s ranking didn’t improve, in fact they dropped (apart from one day where they very briefly spiked). The month after, when the link building was completed, my rankings seemed to be severely punished.
Smart Traffic Conclusion
Save yourself time by burning £500 (plus VAT), then file a spam complaint with Google against your own website.
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I would be especially wary of their pay on results campaign. 20 variations of your most popular keywords in reality probably don’t get any traffic. I have tried one of their pay half now and half on results campaigns and with the keywords I ranked on the first page for I got less than 20 clicks per month, all were long tail.
The traffic figures they tell you you will get are an absolute lie. Everyone needs to be smart about their own SEO, don’t leave it in the hands of somebody else.