So, you hired an SEO firm that has promised you hundreds or thousands of inbound links–but how can you tell if they are outsourcing your important marketing to a foreign country? Of course, outsourcing isn’t a problem in itself, but if the quality of the backlinking submissions suffers, your SEO firm will leave a trail of bad grammar, misspellings, and poorly written descriptions to represent your company and website all over the ‘net.

We run a few internet directories in connection with our web design programs. And these internet directories receive hundreds of submissions a month from all over the world. We see hundreds of listings that are barely legible, or in violation of the most basic rules of link building. And so, every few days, we reject 90% of the inbound links that are submitted to our directories. These are links that should normally be approved, but we are forced to reject them not because of the quality of the sites, but because of the quality of the link submission title and description.

We’ll take a look at some obvious errors that cause real harm to real companies; and, we’ll learn what you can do to prevent it.

Sample: Poorly Written Title Tags (Grammar and Keyword Stuffing)

Here is a submission from a US-based real estate company that came into several of our directories. The unfortunate clients of this backlinking campaign are now left with potentially thousands of lost linking opportunities, and the few hundred links that did get approved were approved by low-value, non-human edited sites, and represent the company poorly. Keep in mind that we get hundreds of these low-quality submissions a week:

Title: Vineyard for sale| Buy a vineyard| vineyard estate for sale| york vineyard for s

Problems:

• The foregoing title is too long for the default PHP Link Directory submission window, so in thousands of directories it will be cut off–that’s even if it is approved in the directory, which is not likely.
• It’s obviously keyword-stuffed, so no decent directory will approve this submission for that reason  (we didn’t).
• The first letters of each word (including city names) aren’t capitalized, so some directories won’t approve.
• This backlinking campaign has obviously been outsourced to folks with poor English skills.

Sample: Description in Broken English

Description: We offers vineyard for sale, Martha’s vineyard for sale, buy vineyard, 
Marthas vineyard for sale, vineyard for sale California, vineyard
land for sale, for sale on vineyard, Oregon vineyard for sale,
vineyard property for sale, buy a vineyard, vineyard estate for sale.

Problems:

• The grammar is horrible (“we offers”).
• The description is keyword stuffed. Anyone who has ever worked in a serious, effective linking campaign knows that keyword stuffing yields a low number of approvals–because directory owners don’t like keywords stuffed titles or descriptions.

If you “follow the trail” of this unfortunate client around the web, you’ll find dozens of links written in broken English. And, one prominent link is this completely nonsensical article, which is little more than a collection of keywords separated by commas: Vineyard for sale| Buy a vineyard| vineyard estate for sale| york vineyard for sale [article was eventually taken down].

Ouch.

Here are some other examples of poorly written descriptions that we rejected:

Adventdesigns is a professional web design company which offer the services are web design, 3d animation, graphicdesign, multimedia and SEO services at affordable cost.

It is very nice blog having lots of information and review about website you usually don’t known about (this submission comes in by the dozens, each month, for a “family” of blog review sites).

How to Investigate the Quality of Your Inbound Links

You can investigate your inbound links to see how they appear on the web. Here’s how to do it:

1. First, you can sign up to Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a service that sends you email alerts when your company’s name (or any other phrase you choose) appears on the web. We use it to learn about new incoming links pointing to this site. Just google the phrase “Google Alerts” to sign up.

2. Or, you can use Yahoo Site Explorer to find all (or nearly all) of the links that point to your website.

• Google the phrase “Yahoo Site Explorer” to get to the Site Explorer.
• In the top window, type in the name of your website, and click the “Explorer URL” box.
• You see a list of all the links on the web (well, the first 1000 or so) that point back to your site. From there you can visit the pages and see how the descriptions are written.

Good luck!

About the author

TastyPlacement (Michael) - Michael David is the founder and lead strategist at TastyPlacement, based in Austin, Texas.