Interesting thread about a free poker link building offer at PAL today. It begins so:
“I have a friend who is an experienced SEO expert and has sold his services to hundreds of internet marketers. He wants to offer his services here, and is willing to give away some link building services for free to one lucky member.”
If the person’s friend is an “experienced SEO expert”, why isn’t his name mentioned? He has sold his services to hundreds of Internet marketers? When did he get started in the business, and who are these presumably satisfied Internet marketer clients? And if he’s an experienced SEO, why is he so eager to offer his services here that he’s willing to do so for free?
Real “experienced SEO experts” don’t give away free poker link building. Try Googling “poker link building services” and notice how few legitimate poker link building services are available. In a niche that small, no expert is giving anything away for free. Not if they’re smart enough to hire, anyway.
The original post goes on to say, “As we know, many of the SEO “experts” that offer their services here, often don’t come up to scratch.”
Who are these poker SEO experts at PAL offering services that don’t come up to scratch? I don’t see a lot of people at PAL offering expert poker SEO services, and the few that do are competent. I can only think of about 5 PAL members who offer poker SEO services, and most of them don’t mention that they offer poker SEO consulting on the forum.
Still later in the post, he mentions, “Just to be clear, the offer only includes link building, as SEO can take a long time and a lot of effort.”
This implies that link building doesn’t take time or effort. Do you really want to hire a link builder who thinks that building poker links takes no time and no effort? Do you really think that the kinds of links that take no time and no effort to get help your business in any way?
Later in the thread, one of the PAL members agreed to take this mysterious poker SEO expert up on his free poker link building offer, but it only took him two hours to change his mind about wanting to participate.
I knew in less than 2 minutes that this was something no one should participate in. Even though it’s supposedly a “free” offer, your time has value. The time spent playing with this free poker link building offer could have been spent building a page of content, or getting a link that would actually matter to your website strategy.
But I must admit, I was curious about the free poker link building offer too. It would have been entertaining to actually see what happened.
The moral of the story?
Unless you have a big budget, do your own link building. (And if you do have a big budget, get in touch with me.)
The only “free poker link building” that’s going to be worth your time is the link building you do for yourself. It’s not really free, because you’re spending your time and effort on it, but at least it will result in some kind of ROI for you. Even if your link building efforts don’t work well at first , you’ll learn a lot about building poker links. If you pay attention.
And knowledge and skill has plenty of value in the long run.
Yup that was me. I was hoping that someone took note of your recent post about link building services and offer a genuinely good service.
I accepted the service so I could hear all about who and what was on offer. When I received the PM I knew I wasn’t on to a good thing.
Was still writing content at the same, and I also learned what some “SEO gurus” are offering in the process.
Nick
I didn’t know if you wanted me to mention you specifically here or not, although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying out their service and reporting back what happened. I saw a thread at WebmasterWorld the other day where someone bought one of those 2000 directory links packages for $49 or something like that and monitored their results for a few months. It was entertaining enough, and it never hurts to get actual hard data on such things.
When I first got started in this business, I participate in a massive link trading scheme that I wouldn’t go near today. I also bought some of those bulk traffic deals where you get thousands of impressions for $20, even though I’d been told they were a bad idea by more experienced webmasters. Trying stuff and finding out what works for yourself is one of the best things you can do as an SEO.
Your last sentence is pure gold. I am going to write a blog post about that specifically.
People base their whole strategies based around what an “SEO professional” told them.
I know myself, I do not learn unless I do it myself. This is true in all facets of my life.