We all want to build more links for our web sites and rank higher in the search engines, but at what cost? Fiverr is one of the most popular micro jobs sites around, and you can order link wheels and article spinning jobs for around $5 each. How could you possibly get thousands of links back to your site for only $5? That’s the question we have for you today. I recently had the chance to interview Alex Pyatetsky from TheHoth, about some of the frequency asked questions in the SEO world, and how important the different methods of link building are for web sites.
I see a lot of link build package on Fiverr, where you can have original articles spun into thousands of links back to your web site. What are your thoughts on these services, the quality of the links, and how they can impact a web site that is using these methods?
As someone who employs a sizable team of writers and link builders (shameless plug:Â The HOTH builds links for hundreds of agencies & publishers worldwide, every month), I’m intimately familiar with the costs of content creation and link building. Once you do the math, its blatantly obvious that you get what you pay for with these services on Fiverr.
First, lets look at the content. If you go an average internet marketing forum, oDesk, Elance, etc., and find an Indian/Filipino writer to write content for you, you’ll find that the baseline going rate is $1/100 words. You can find some for cheaper, but despite what you heard in 4 Hour Work Week about hidden Einsteins working for pennies on the dollar, writers working for less than $1/100 words probably produce complete garbage and have the reliability of fruit flies.
So let’s say you ask your writer to create a 400-500 word article (standard 20 sentence length), spun at the sentence level 3 times. This means you’re asking for 1200-1500 words of content total. That’ll cost you $12-15 at 3rd world rates.So what are the guys on Fiverr doing? Although I haven’t done a detailed investigation, I can almost bet you that they’re mostly plagiarizing content and running it through automatic spinners, which turn it into gibberish. If you’re remotely paranoid/risk-averse in your seo, this is the diametric opposite of what you want your link builders to be doing.Next, they are probably building links in an extremely primitive, obviously footprinted manner. The reason is because there is readily available software that can do this for them. In order to feed themselves off of your $5 order, they can’t afford to spend an extra minute on your work and will need to automate it however possible. This poses a rather serious risk for you. In the best case, you’ll be flushing a perfectly good fiver down the toilet and in the worst cases you’ll be putting your site and its rankings at risk.A popular footprint that you’ll see all over Fiverr is the link wheel. Its one of the most primitive and easily detectable link structures out there. I’m betting that anyone that’s made it through 2 semesters worth of scripting language classes can write a script that detects link wheels. Trust that the folks at Google can do far better.To build any links of quality takes time and skill. The vendors on Fiverr either have no skill and are therefore willing to work for pennies just to produce something, no matter how crappy. Or, if they do have skill, they are knowingly passing off a crapy, fully-automated deliverable to you. If they had skill and were spending time creating quality links for you, they’d be charging substantially more than a fiver.The only value proposition these guys have is that they’re cheap.Would you drive a car that had a 33% chance of spontaneously combusting each time you reached 20MPH? How about it it only cost you a Fiverr?
First, lets look at the content. If you go an average internet marketing forum, oDesk, Elance, etc., and find an Indian/Filipino writer to write content for you, you’ll find that the baseline going rate is $1/100 words. You can find some for cheaper, but despite what you heard in 4 Hour Work Week about hidden Einsteins working for pennies on the dollar, writers working for less than $1/100 words probably produce complete garbage and have the reliability of fruit flies.Make sure you don’t skimp on the cost of your SEO and link building, as it might come back to haunt you in the end! To discover more secrets of link building and search rankings, visit TheHoth, and see how you can start your own aggressive link building package. Trial link building packages start at just $60, Results package (five times more links) are also available for $200.
