Macalua.com

If I got 1 centavo for every grammatical/typographical error on content written by clients abroad, I’d be one rich dude :) but you can’t nail them just because they can’t write ala Strunk & White.

So imagine my linkbaitsense going nuts with this Another stupid SEO strategy: the filipino link builder who can’t write post by Alister Cameron:

But hey… at the very least try to get it done to a standard where it’s not immediately obvious that it’s someone else and not you! Secondly, make sure you’re not paying more than a few cents per link for this “service” because blog comments are the lowest of the low hanging fruit, for a couple of reasons:

1. For a start, the search engines and directories (like Technorati) don’t count the URL/link under the comment author’s name for much. Only links in the body of the post count for anything worth the trouble.
2. To add insult to injury, many (but definitely not all) blogs these days attach a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the A tag of the link to the commenter’s website/blog, rendering it of no value in a link-building campaign. No value for any keywords that matter to you, anyway.

I don’t know why anyone would want to hand real money over to a filipino link-builder who didn’t understand those two points!

I agree with Elber’s comment…to mention nationality once would have been edgy enough, but to hammer it again and again…that’s downright derogatory.

I’m speculating here, but I think it’s this statement, along with the title, that makes this post come off as derogatory. There was no real need, IMO, to mention the nationality of the commenter twice (thrice if you count the RDNS lookup). Simply saying that the said person couldn’t write would have sufficed.

What Alister Cameron doesn’t get is that you get what you pay for. It doesn’t matter which race/nationality you do business with. If you pay for bad talent in New York, you’ll get bad output. Same with Australia, India, the UK or Antartica. One more thing, you drop comments/trackbacks on blogs for click traffic purposes too, it’s not all about link popularity. A strategically placed, well written comment can even be an effective reader/feed subscriber recruitment tool since it brings the prospects in.

Link building gurus will have to come up with a new class for this linkbaiting technique: racial bait. With so many content publishers in the Philippines, that may work but believe me, pissing off a large online segment is not something I’d want my blog consultant to be doing.

Via Jayvee.