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Ask HN: Company is using low quality sites to build links. Is that bad SEO?

2 points by SEOhhh ↗ HN
It has been found that company is creating, or paying a "trusted vendor" to create, fake websites and user profiles in order to stuff keywords on those sites and then link back to company site and social media profile. This is part of SEO strategy.

Sites include everything from free website hosting sites, forum profiles, industry job / skills boards, and even artist community sites.

Every site has same messaging and same links to company site and social media platform.

Many of the free website hosting sites appear as if it is company but often have incomplete templates using example text, example services, example address, and example team member profiles including photo but home page has same messaging and same links to real company site and social media platform.

Nearly 50% of the sites use rel=nofollow links.

Nearly 50% of the sites use a fake person name.

Some sites say the fake person works for the company.

Is this is bad?

If think this bad how would you try to educate company that this is bad (keep in mind trusted "high quality" vendor is in play with the decision making process).

2 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] thread
[dead] justin_evans
Well if we talk about SEO, it means you should focus on quality links that can be beneficial for your website. Low-quality links may have some severe impacts on your website. Another thing is that leads exist on high PR sites which are looking some excellent and trusty business to interact with, so you must use a trustable platform and make sure you don't stuff keywords as its considered a wrong approach.
comis
It sounds like the vendor is lazy and relatively bad at SEO, but mass-creating blog networks to build backlinks still very much works in 2019 (though its morality is up for debate).

Where it sounds like they might be messing up and potentially setting the company up to get nuked is by directly linking from their spam sites to their main site. That's a big no-no.

If you want more information you should search "tiered link-building".