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The folks over at Freelancer have come up with an incredibly brilliant link building strategy that will not only get them tons of links on relevant domains but also get them appropriate anchor text. How did they do it? Throw a contest.

Here’s the gist of the contest: You write an article about Freelancer on your blog and then you use your SEO skills to get the article to rank. The articles that rank the highest in Google will be awarded a prize of $15,000. Money, money, money! This sounds like an awesome way to make money right? It’s also an ingenious way of getting relevant links, Google will never find out. Or will they?

You see Freelancer wants you to link to their site with pre-approved anchor text. Doh! They’ve actually chosen four keywords they want to rank for: “Freelance developers”, “Freelance designers”, “Hire a developer”, and “Hire a designer”. It’s kind of telling that they don’t have hire an seo.

While this seemed like a great idea to gain links, in a post-penguin world it’s a dangerous strategy and here’s why. First of all you’re going to have links from all these “SEO blogs” pointing to your site. I use quotes because none of these sites are doing white hat SEO, nor know how to do white hat SEO. So in order to rank their own posts, they are going to hit them with forum links, article submission links, free directory links, bookmarking links, (you know all the Darth Vader approved links) to rank – It will look something like this.

Scary right? Now if Darth Vader breathing down your web ranking’s proverbial neck isn’t scary enough for you. They also have pre-approved anchor text to which you must link to them with. If you don’t think Google isn’t going to notice that you all of a sudden you gained links for the same four anchor texts, you’ve spent too much time on Digital Point. Google can easily smell this. What do you think the penguin update was all about? Just imagine all the sites linking to Freelancer with their pre-approved anchor text. Now imagine all the Darth Vader approved sites linking to the sites that are now linking to Freelancer. This is what it will look like (at least to someone that’s watched way too many science fiction films).

So what could Freelancer do to make this contest #whitehat, #ethical, #teamlukeskywalker? They really only need to do three things:

(1) Write Whatever You Want

They stipulate that your review must “present Freelancer in a positive light”. Instead they should let people write whatever they want. By doing this, sure you will get people saying good, bad and ugly things, but you will also have a higher chance of getting good quality links and you will have a higher chance of being linked to from pages that are semantically diversified. Google is getting incredibly good at telling the nature of a web page. What do you think the Ph.D’s that work at Google do all day? Draw doodles.

Google may not notice it now but you can bet going forward that they will notice that you have all these sites with the same four anchor texts linking to you from web pages with favorable reviews. You can be assured that Google is eventually going to use rel=author to determine which links are quality and which are spam. So if you have authors with little to no trust linking to you, your links will be devalued and your site will fall.

(2) Allow Anchor Text Diversity

You cannot enforce other websites as to how they link to you. It’s a free world and webmasters can link to your site any which way they want. And the beautiful thing is you want them to do it like this. This is because it will give your site more anchor text diversity, which post-Penguin, Google loves. By only allowing four different anchor texts, you run the risk of running into an over-optimization penalty. You might as well email Matt Cutts and tell him what words you are trying to rank for.

(3) Winner is Decided By Committee

Instead of deciding the winner based on how well they rank in Google, because all that’s going to do is lead to Darth Vader approved links pointing to pages that will be pointing to Freelancer, they should decide the winner based on committee. Have the Freelancer community vote on which reviews are the best and choose the top 10 or 20. Out of those selected, choose the smartest people that work at Freelancer and have them rate each entry. It will obviously involve more work on Freelancer’s end but it’s more rewarding because (a) they won’t have to worry about being linked to from pages that have links from bad neighborhoods and (b) they will have a better idea of what the community is saying about their service, which they can then use to improve their service (and hopefully get more users!). Aren’t feedback loops awesome?

Assumptions

I realize I have made some assumptions here that I should address.

The first assumption is that Freelancer’s SEO community will only use “black hat” techniques to win the contest. Currently, the contest has 500 submissions, after looking briefly at them and the proposals made, it’s pretty clear, at least to me, that most of these so-called SEO’s will be doing black hat link building (Hey it takes a former black hat, to know another!). It’s not like reputable SEO sites are going to link to Freelancer with the agreed anchor text (because then they wouldn’t be reputable anymore).

The second assumption I make is that having four anchor text isn’t enough diversity. Let’s say there is say 1,000 contest submissions, that means there will be 1,000 links pointing to Freelancer. We would then divide that number by 4 for each of the four different anchor texts, assuming they are divided up evenly (which is unlikely), this would give Freelancer 250 links for each anchor text. Would this improve or harm Freelancer’s back link profile?

If we take a look at Freelancer’s link profile, they have a very strong back links (which makes me question why would they even do this contest in the first place). Opensite is showing they have domain authority of 88/100 with 7,454 external links pointing to them and 426k Facebook Likes, these are all signs of a reputable brand. But we all know that even reputable brand’s can lose rankings in Google when they are caught doing dirty things.

So what gives? Why would they have this contest? If we look at the keywords they are targeting, they are already ranking in the top 8 in the US: for “freelance developer” they are ranked #1, for “freelance designer” they are #3 and for “hire a developer” they are sitting at #8. Not too shabby. However, for the anchor text, “hire a designer” they are nowhere to be found. So this contest looks like a way to improve their ranking for “hire a designer” as well as to maintain or increase their other rankings slightly (because hey if you’re not in the top 3 you might as well be invisible right?). The thing is, and here’s the rub, this contest will have the unintended consequences of less favorable Google rankings.

Are Contests Good for SEO?

I do think contests are a great strategy for gaining awareness for your site. However, when they are done in such a way as to influence rankings, I don’t believe it’s a good idea. Sure your site is gaining incoming links with relevant anchor texts, but at what cost? Are these links future proof? I don’t think so. Also, I want to make it clear, I think Freelancer is a great site to hire developers [sidebar: if I link to them I could enter this very post in the contest] and I will continue to use it for such.

What do you think? Is Freelancer doing the right thing?

Update: Freelancer has changed the rules to this contest in accordance with my suggestions. I say, good on them!