Outsourcing in a Post Google Penguin World

link-building-brisbane — Outsourcing your link building to an English speaking emerging economy like India, Pakistan, the Philippines or New Zealand can reduce SEO costs.

Because building backlinks to your web pages is so important for good Google rankings, and also very tedious and time consuming task, I am often asked about the practice of outsourcing link building through sites such as Elance, ODesk or VWorker.

Outsourcing link building can be a great idea, and here are some tips that will reduce your risk.

Look at the feedback from other buyers for your prospective outsourcer for the same type of work. Yes, you will pay more per link for someone with great feedback, but it is always, but always worth the extra expense.
Ask lots of questions about the type of links they will build for you. Are they manual or machine made (automated spam) ? What sort of links will they be (blog comments, articles, forum signature, social bookmarks etc). What will the PageRank of the page that the link will be on?
Where possible try to pay on a confirmed link by link basis. Example $65 for a PR5 link, $45 for a PR 4 link and so on.
When you start out with a new outsourcer, rather than build links directly to your main web site, as a trial get them to build links to other web pages that already link to yours. In other words create a second tier of new links to your existing links to give those existing links more weight. [use this free tool to find some of your existing links]. This approach also reduces the risk of your web site being pinged by Google for “artificial or unnatural links”. Once you are happy with your new outsourcer, and the quality of the links they have built for you, then you may start directing new links at your main web site, starting with some internal pages (not the home page)
If you do happen to find a great link building outsourcer and a reasonable price, keep your mouth shut 🙂 Seriously, if you found someone who will build 50 good quality links from pages of PR1 and above for less than $100, would you tell anyone for free?