White hat link building - is it real

[bruce bates]

I constantly see ads from SEO companies that claim they provide white hat link building services.

I am wondering what people think of these types of services - not in whether they can produce results but rather as to whether or not the are really white hat?

In general one uses the term white hat to imply they are following rules that are acceptable and not in violation of rules set forth by (in this case) search engines. The main reason SEO companies provide link building services is to increase ranking on google. As such, in my opinion there is no such thing as a white hat link building service.

According to the google webmasters guidelines from my understanding is any links that are intentionally obtained to increase rankings (ie they don't use nofollow) would be a a violation of their terms.

Specifically google says:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

Keeping this in mind, I don't believe white hat link building is white hat at all and at any moment google could (as they have done in he past) delist anyone who intentionally builds links to their site - no matter what an SEO company may say.

I am wondering what others opinions on this are and if their is something I am missing?

 

[T J Tutor]

there is no such thing as a white hat link building service

Agreed! There is nothing white hat about a service that is not in compliance.

I have found with my content sites that when linking, it is a specific part of relationships we build with others. The sites are genre and niche specific and therefore all content links in and out are there for the benefit of the content and any shared content obtained with permissions or exchanges. That's as white hat as it gets, IMO.

Many use those services, and in the end, most do get delisted.

I use high quality content and new content created almost daily now. It's the content that attracts the advertisers and the relationships with others in the same genres and niches resulting in do-follow links of high quality.

Buying link exchange services today is no different that buying likes, friends, etc. Sooner or later it will catch up to one who does this.

 

[Graybeard]

A picture is worth 1000 words.
It's a lot of risky work for a throw away domain ...

 

[A.A. Qureshi]

I constantly see ads from SEO companies that claim they provide white hat link building services.

I am wondering what people think of these types of services - not in whether they can produce results but rather as to whether or not the are really white hat?

In general one uses the term white hat to imply they are following rules that are acceptable and not in violation of rules set forth by (in this case) search engines. The main reason SEO companies provide link building services is to increase ranking on google. As such, in my opinion there is no such thing as a white hat link building service.

According to the google webmasters guidelines from my understanding is any links that are intentionally obtained to increase rankings (ie they don't use nofollow) would be a a violation of their terms.

Specifically google says:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

Keeping this in mind, I don't believe white hat link building is white hat at all and at any moment google could (as they have done in he past) delist anyone who intentionally builds links to their site - no matter what an SEO company may say.

I am wondering what others opinions on this are and if their is something I am missing?

I tend to partially disagree with you on this. Editorial link building is still a White Hat Technique where a backlinking happens to occur naturally.
Although many site owners still seek to gain links by asking for but editorial links are still considered to be the organic form of link building.

The only raw material for quality links is high quality and valuable content. And making money out of it is also not unethical.

 

[bruce bates]

We definitely have a different view on this. Of course making money is not an issue. That's why google has nofollow links, so people can still make money while not affecting ranking.

Getting editorials is not considered organic by any means. Organic links literally means links you received by no action of your own. Intentionally getting any kind of link is not organic.

Getting editorials is not within and of itself wrong - but if you are doing so specifically for the purpose of backlinks to increase rankings google can delist you or discredit all those backlinks.

In my opinion your view, is a very similar view people had about review sites pre-penguin and panda updates, and then countless people complained their rankings were lost after the updates. I can't even begin to count how many complained it wasn't fair because they were following the rules, yet it didn't stop google from knocking their rankings for trying to game the system.

 

[T J Tutor]

Getting editorials is not within and of itself wrong - but if you are doing so specifically for the purpose of backlinks to increase rankings google can delist you or discredit all those backlinks.

In my experience over the years, this is correct.

 

[A.A. Qureshi]

We definitely have a different view on this. Of course making money is not an issue. That's why google has nofollow links, so people can still make money while not affecting ranking.

Getting editorials is not considered organic by any means. Organic links literally means links you received by no action of your own. Intentionally getting any kind of link is not organic.

Getting editorials is not within and of itself wrong - but if you are doing so specifically for the purpose of backlinks to increase rankings google can delist you or discredit all those backlinks.

In my opinion your view, is a very similar view people had about review sites pre-penguin and panda updates, and then countless people complained their rankings were lost after the updates. I can't even begin to count how many complained it wasn't fair because they were following the rules, yet it didn't stop google from knocking their rankings for trying to game the system.

When you say Google can knock your rankings if it finds you gaming its algorithm, you are absolutely correct. All I wanted to say was that organic link building still exists and editorially placed links(where you don't outreach for links manually) are a great way of doing so.

In a way, we both emphasized the same thing. Cheers!

 

[A.A. Qureshi]

In my experience over the years, this is correct.

I agree with you @T J Tutor.

 

[aff-marktr-remote]

Links that count, or should count, are those given freely. If you ask for the link, Google says it's spam. But the idea is that Google doesn't know, if you do it carefully. But if you pay someone for 100 links, he'll want to finish the job in 20 minutes--and you get a penalty. If you got them by nicely suggesting a story or a blog post over time, you'd pay a lot of money, but the links would be golden. However, that you need to do it yourself.

 

[Tujora]

It takes time really and do matter which types of links you are really obtain here for a lot of reasons. You can do free links by yourself, but you will need to promote such sites later anyway and I am not sure I am realise what was done on that matter completely.