An interesting post over at SEOptimise about Google penalising a beanbag site that appeared to be gaining links from SEO bloggers through sending out free products for reviews.

Now personally having worked on several trade journals myself in the past I’ve seen this technique being used many times to good effect in gaining free editorial. I would certainly class is as a legitmate marketing tactic. It obviously seems to be working for SumoLounge as they have received coverage from publications such as the Wall St Journal and Playboy.

Not legitmate as far as Google are concerned though as they appear to have slapped Sumo Lounge with a homepage PR penalty.

Now that we know that product reviews are no longer tolerated, maybe we should be reporting posts like this, this and this. Looks to me like it ticks all the boxes of being unrelated and using optimised anchor text.

Friday, 31. October 2008 at 10:15 am and posted in Google, Linkbuilding. Track comments: RSS 2.0 You can comment here or place a trackback here