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22 April 2010

Express Group contacts SEOs to sell links

Posted by: Mark Cook

I was somewhat surprised today, after having made my view that paid links are a dumb idea, that the Express Group should send me an e-mail offering to sell links.

I received this e-mail:

Subject: SEO Advertorials - Daily Express

Message:

You may be interested to know, here at the ‘Express Group’ we have started to integrate SEO advertorials amongst our news articles across our three main sites – Daily Express (http://express.co.uk/) Daily Star ( http://www.dailystar.co.uk) and OK ( http://ok.co.uk/)

The SEO Advertorials run in a prominent position on a selected channel homepage (IE: Fashion) for a two week/one month period and then are archived for over 15 months.

For SEO benefits, we ask you to highlight terms you wish to use as external text links and supply destination URL for each highlighted term to and ensure the title of the article has good SEO benefits as this will be picked up in search engine

We ask for you to supply, 250-500 words of content and supporting images.

Advertorials start at £1,000 per article but am happy to negotiate on bundle deals.

EXAMPLES [Note: These links don't work anymore as the Express chose to remove them]

Fashion

http://ok.co.uk/posts/view/15091/Wallis-Winter-Wonderland
http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/158965/Ahead-of-the-curve
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/starfun/view/118129/Sexy-shopping-for-the-shy/

Money

http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/153004/Need-a-loan-Read-this-first
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/cashpoint/view/121665/Money-saving-tips-for-new-parents/
http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/158317/How-paying-voluntary-excess-car-insurance-can-lower-your-premiums
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/motoring/view/122379/-Is-your-car-an-object-of-desire-/
http://www.express.co.uk/money/view/157108/A-guide-to-working-from-home

Retail

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163068/Laptops-Buying-Guide-Things-You-Need-To-Know

Travel

http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163077/A-hotel-stay-in-a-UK-Town-can-help-you-save-your-pennies-
http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163093/-Is-the-South-West-still-best-for-self-catering-holidays-

Food

http://www.ok.co.uk/food/view/18960/Buy-Wine-Online-through-Wine-Clubs/
http://www.ok.co.uk/food/view/17894/Get-excited-about-food-again-with-free-online-recipes/

Motoring

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/style/view/125428/Aspiring-models-to-grasp-fast-track-opportunity-with-both-hands/
http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/163093/-Is-the-South-West-still-best-for-self-catering-holidays-

If this is something you could be interested in, please feel free to give me a call on the number below.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks,

[name deleted]

Damaging the reputation of SEO

This is exactly the kind of thing that gives the search marketing industry a bad reputation and it damages the service we provide.

I would be interested to see Google's response to such overt, mass-scale link selling. While the Express Group may only link to what they consider "clean" sites, they collectively have enough power to make decent dents in search results.

I wonder what stops me purchasing a link and then 301ing it elsewhere to a pharma site? Seems like a very high-risk strategy they are undertaking. What are your thoughts?

Post Update:

E-Consultancy has written a great opinion piece on the issue.

Malcolm Coles suggests the Express website may be under penalty and the OK website has been hit several times over the last few months with PR drops.

You can use this query to see all of the MirrorGroup sold links (via Richard Shove)

Post Update #2:

Once again, Jaamit's sharp eye has seen that the Express Group have removed their SEO Advertorial examples. However the pages are still present in the Google cache though.

15 Comments

Richard Shove

I love it how they've made it easy to track which articles have paid links in too::

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=**SPONSORED+ARTICLE**+site%3Aexpress.co.uk&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

I certainly wouldn't pay �1,000 for those links but there's obviously people out there that are willing to take the risk

Comment posted 22.04.10 @ 17:58

Lyndon

I think we need to do a link crawl of the Daily Express, see who they link to and then see if the same SEO agency client list keeps coming up. ;)

Comment posted 22.04.10 @ 18:19

Cory Howell

Thanks for sharing such a clear example of this practice Mark. Every day the strategies change and new names popup (e.g. SEO advertorials??).

This is happening every day on most major online news publications. To think it is not is naive.

Google seems to look the other way when considering the source, however, as many large publications are unaffected (or are not applied) by a penalty/filter.

Comment posted 22.04.10 @ 18:51

Peter Handley

Amusingly, I have arrived in the office this morning to exactly the same email from the Daily Express.

I didnt come across your blog about why buying links is a dumb idea at the time, although one of my articles was referenced in the Guardian story that you linked to from that.

I think some people at the Guardian were quite surprised that they were selling links that would pass SEO benefit - I spoke to the writer of that article prior to them posting it, and they seemed genuinely adamant that it wasnt something that they would do.

We've been approached by the Trinity Mirror group before (though I can no longer find the email offering this), and there was a fella at the BrightonSEO event in February that was openly talking about getting this type of advertorial link.

Sadly I suspect that newspapers selling links is rife and unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 08:04

James Morell

Sadly this type of thing is rife amongst publishers. I spend a lot of time shouting *NO* at people here, but when you see competitors selling links with seeming impunity then the arguments for it seem hard to combat.

More worrying is a company (who shall remain nameless) approaching us recently looking to buy links in archived content for SEO purposes. This was on a massive scale and they claimed they already had a number of publishers signed up.

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 09:42

Carl

This is nothing new - it has been going on for months :-)

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 09:51

Mark

@Richard
Great little query - I'll update the post.

@Corey / @Carl
Having worked in a lot of competitive sectors, I'm well aware of the excent of the link economy and the fact that newspapers have been selling links for ages, it isn't new; but cold e-mailing agencies is a step too far. I think this overt/mass approach is taking it a step too far and can damage the SEO industry.

One of the important things that online represents for me, is choice. A lot of the time, you don't need to be the biggest brand or have the most cash to do well, if you offer a good product or service, you can succeed. It will be a sad day if this changes to a "most cash wins" situation.

@Peter Interesting, I've been approached by TrinityMirror as well. I declined, but at least they took the time to look up my name and picked up the phone, they didn't just send an e-mail to the generic address on the site!

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 10:07

Peter Handley

I just wrote http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/more-newspapers-selling-links/ and referenced your blog there.

I'll grant you're Trinity Mirror - they did at least phone us to gauge our interest first - but the generic blanket email from the Express was somewhat crass

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 10:22

Andy @ FirstFound

Oh dear. This isn't good news.

I'd like to see Google taking a firm stance on this, but with the paywall looming over the horizon, would they go as far as to drop a leading (unfortunately) UK Newspaper from the SERPs, like they would if an average Joe tried this?

Somehow I doubt it.

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 11:23

Mark

@Andy

I think the best course of action for the search engines may be to keep the pages ranking but not pass any link juice from the paid links on those articles.

They may already quietly be doing it. I don't think a complete ban would be in anyone's interest.

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 11:41

Ralph du Plessis

While I agree with Google in principal on this matter, I think they are being hypocrites because if you can happily buy links on loads of crap sites and get away with it as many household names do, then why is a paid advertorial with useful content and contextual links being punished?

I know it is the Express being nailed and not the advertiser, but the advertisers using this method are in my opinion far more ethical than those buying and renting links with no content to support them.

it would be real nice if Google could be more consistent here.

See Rand Fishkin's post on SEOMoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-penalize-ban-the-site-i-spam-reported

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 15:25

Mark

I 100% agree with you Ralph. I would suggest perhaps it lies with an order of priority.

Sites with little/no content to support the links they are selling are unlikely to have many links themselves. Therefore purchasing links from these sites will not have a drastic impact on search results.

Sites that sell links with vast quantities of good content are much more likely to have lots of incoming links and will influence SERPs - so I imagine they would be a priority for Google.

As I said though, I do agree with you and it would be nice to see some more parity with dealing with link sellers and brokers.

Comment posted 23.04.10 @ 15:36

pete

I wonder if you view has changed on this? Just seen your client has a page:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/177576/TONING-SHOES-GUIDE/TONING-SHOES-GUIDETONING-SHOES-GUIDE

Care to share the results?

Comment posted 16.07.10 @ 14:03

Mark

Hi Pete,

Our SEO campaign for Fitness Footwear finished in May 2009, when they hired people to continue SEO inhouse. Our ranking for "fitfops" on parting ways was 2nd and now they're currently ranking 11th.

So I guess the results of link buying speak for themselves.

We occassionally do one off consulting work for them, but as you can probably guess - not something I would personally recommend.

Great spot though.

Comment posted 16.07.10 @ 14:42

pete

No probs.

Thanks for the update.

Great blog BTW.

Comment posted 16.07.10 @ 14:50