SponsoredReviews.com Announces New Feature – LinkSets™
SponsoredReviews.com, a service that connects advertisers with bloggers willing to write honest reviews about their products and services, has added a new feature to their program – LinkSets.
LinkSets allow you to create an unlimited number of URL/Link Text combinations inside of your opportunities. The LinkSets system will then automatically handle assigning those links to bloggers as you purchase reviews.
Under the previous system, you could add three links along with custom anchor text for each opportunity you create. An opportunity is simply the information an advertiser displays to a blogger such as pages they want blogger to link to, description of site, goals, etc.
LinkSets will allow you to do the following:
- Easily build links to dozens, even hundreds of URL’s on your site
- Easily rotate though link text in order to focus on more keywords
- Build a specific number of links to a given URL or link text automatically
Here is a screenshot of what adding additional LinkSets to an opportunity might look like:
Besides this new feature, SponsoredReviews claims to have over 23,000 bloggers waiting to review your site. Their filtering system allows advertisers to filter blogs by Google Pagerank, Google Cache, Compete Estimated Traffic, Yahoo Backlinks, Alexa Rank and more.
I have personally used the service as an advertiser and find it an excellent way to connect with bloggers who will write honest evaluations and reviews about your site, products and/or services.
The service is very affordable as well with pricing starting at just $5 a post.
For additional information, check out their LinkSets instructions/FAQs page.
About the Author: David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses.
Steve | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
I’ve just come across your site and I must say it is very informative and helpful, I can see myself spending a lot of time here.
Regarding this post – I didn’t realise this type of service was openly available. By doing this type of advertisering would G consider it paid for text links?
As we all know G doesn’t like buying text links and I am a bit concerned about going down the route of sponsored reviews because of this. What has your experience been? Have sites been banned through using sponsored reviews?
David Wallace | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
@Steve – Technically, yes Google would see it as “paid links” however, I feel that it is none of Google’s business what a site does – whether they sell paid links or do not. If you have read through other posts in this blog, you will learn that I am certainly for paid links and view Google’s stance against them as war. But hey, marketing is war anyway, right?
Blog reviews are really effective due to the fact that it is very difficult for Google’s algorithm to know if a blog post have been influenced by money or not. I would almost think it would have to involve human intervention and if you know anything about Google’s spam fighting practices, they like to do thinks algorithmically as opposed to manually.
What happens if they decide a link is paid? Typically they no longer count it or allow it to pass any value. That is why it is important that link builders continually monitor their links, especially those they are paying for on a regular basis, to make sure they are still adding value to their search marketing efforts.
I don’t see them banning the site receiving the link because they may or may not be at fault.
Steve | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
Fair comments.
I may test the water with one of our lesser sites first.
Keyword Research Services | May 28, 2009 | Reply
I agree with your comments about paid links David. It is silly for Google to wage their war against that practice. It is their own fault for sharing PageRank information with the public in the first place. They basically tell which links will likely help the most, yet they don’t accept that people will go after those links by any means possible.
I have purchased a large quantity of paid reviews for a previous website that I marketed. One problem is that nearly half the sites would drop down to PR0 at some point. Also with blog reviews, you experience a small rankings boost when the post is first published. Then after that post gets pushed onto page 2 and then into the archives, the benefits of those reviews quickly die off. So it isn’t a very good long term strategy.