Link For Charity
I just received an email about an interesting little link building idea with a charity twist. The requirements for linking were quite strict so I will just copy and paste the relevant section 
:
Alex Shalman at Practical Personal Development (a blog about self help and personal growth) is hosting a Donation Contest in which you press a button and he donates a dollar
I mentioned to Alex and I will mention it here; you are far better in my opinion with this sort of thing allowing people to choose their own anchor text.
- Careful you are not raising a red flag in search engines
- You are asking for a favour, do not expect people to jump through more hoops than necessary
Clever way of getting lots of links so kudos
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By Chris Garrett. Posted in Marketing
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Do you think sites will really gain longterm authority from these gimmicky link contests?
Probably the most self serving use of charity I’ve seen. He’s already been mentioned by you and Chow, I’ll bet he makes it to 500.
I think the goal of getting noticed will work. Links tend to work best when they look natural. The key thing with publicity is backing it up with value so we will have to wait and see how well it works long term.
I really don’t like this type of linkbaits because designated anchor texts seems really forced and just reminds me too much of the stuff that comes out of paid blogging networks like Payperpost.
Like John said, the whole thing is rather gimmicky and I think might be even detrimental for site branding.
One thing I’m interested in is if Technorati will try to stop people from using promotions like this to game the rankings. Same for Google with search.
John Chow’s original link-for-review promotion has already brought him links from 350 or so blogs. They stopped the 2000 Blogger Project because it skewed the rankings. Is this type of thing any better?
The biggest problem is that if it works, more and more people will start doing it. I might need a break from reading blogs.
What ever happened to writing super quality content to get link backs
I keep finding all these link-for-review, link-for-competition, link-for-charity things about. Bleh!
@Maki, @John, @Collis – It’s interesting how everyone has their own boundaries for what is a good tactic or not, but we need links to get noticed. For me any link tactic has to be a win-win-win (reader, linker, linked). Many people focus on what is in it for them without regard to the other two parties in the equation.
If your content is good, and good for my readers, I will link to it.
I don’t do link exchanges. I feel that if something is going to be on my blog it should fit the blog and add some sort of value to the blog.