It doesn’t matter if you’re a car dealer or a third party advertising company for used cars, the odds of getting somebody to naturally link to your site is pretty slim.
Many car dealers are so focused on keywords and meta tags they forget one of the most important aspects in search engine optimization which is backlinks.
If you don’t have links from other websites (especially links from related content sites) pointing to your website you simply will not show up in many search engine queries.
Many companies are forced to purchase links from relevant websites in order to help their rankings. If you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines you will see that Google makes it clear that:
…… some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
We have a network of auto related websites, and we do not buy or sell links. If we did and Google caught us, we would be penalized and never show up in their search engines, which can be the kiss of death for any website, since Google accounts for about 80% of internet traffic.
Tonight I was checking one of my blog comments waiting for my approval. This is what I got:
Hello,
My name is Jamie Vanderhorst from lemonfree.com.
We are currently looking for advertising opportunities with qualified partners.
I came across your site blog.used-cars-fl.com and found your information and website very useful. I would like to buy a link: “corvette for sale” off your page http://blog.used-cars-fl.com/ – the link would point to (I deleted the link, but it was pointing to their website with the anchor text “Corvettes”.
In return, I’d send you $19.00 via PayPal for the link.
Let me know what you think of this deal.
Best,
Jamie Vanderhorst
Marketing Representative
lemonfree.com
Patrick Bennett and I have worked hard getting this site to rank and get some quality traffic. What really burns me is that they think they can buy us for a mere $18.00?
There is nothing a despise more than black hat SEO, which is what this is. As my duty, I am forced to report them to Google via Google Webmaster Tools.
In case there are other out there frustrated by Black Hat SEO Tactics, Matt Cutts from Google tells you what to do here.
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