If our link profile is too "blog link" heavy, will that be all that bad?

[AarcMediaGroup]

We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers.

We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit.  They are for women.  Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50.  Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40.  So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive.

Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs.  We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything.  We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it.

Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs".

Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation.  It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out.

Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews.  A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review.

So what are all ya'll's thoughts?  I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.

[jesse-landry]

Oh you'll be fine. Google isn't necessarily going to differentiate a blog page versus just a web page. To the Google bots they see an HTML page and that's it that's all. If the sites themselves are relevant, the anchor text isn't all the same keyword, and the links aren't appearing 1,000 at a time you will be just fine.

Basically if your links come naturally then you're good. And this is a pretty natural way of gaining them. Some will say that sending out free product in hopes of a link is potentially against webmaster guidelines but I disagree with that. The fact of the matter is you are gaining sales from these reviews and that's all that really matters. So good job! Sounds like you're kickin butt, keep it up!

[AarcMediaGroup]

So it turns out, we aren't in fact "requesting" the link.  At the bottom of the email we put a "relevant" links section that includes a link to our home page, our "product application" page which shows them how to apply the product, as well as links to the product page of the items we sent them.  We make no mention of "requesting" the link formally, so sounds like we're all good.  And thus far 100% of those that have actually done the reviews have provided links and I've been surprised at the anchor text some of them have used.  It has worked out very well so far for us, and the industry is very competitive.

Thanks for the 2nd thoughts.  It's what I thought myself but it's always nice to get confirmation from others.

[MichaelC-15022]

While it doesn't matter whether the linking sites are blogs, there are a couple of things you need to be aware of:

• if tons of them are at the same root domain (e.g. *.blogspot.com), you're not getting as much link power as if they're from different root domains
• some mommy bloggers can be really, really spammy....if you're getting lots of links from sites where the blogger is clearly getting paid to write "fluff" articles to link to car insurance, viagra, online poker, mortgage refy, replica watches, etc., you may end up with a suspicious-looking link profile and that could result in a manual penalty

[AarcMediaGroup]

As I said, we're only approaching, legit blogs, mommy or otherwise. So that isn't a worry. I was just worried that the bulk of our links are going to end up being blog reviews. And I'm also not worried about the passing of strength in theory, because in the end it's really more of an "ad campaign" than anything else.

I'd say around 1/3 of the reviews done so far just happen to be blogspot blogs, but that's just because they were quicker to respond.  When the dust settles, 70% will be from unique domains, while about 30% will in fact be blogspot blogs. But that's the nature of the beast.  Mommies love free blogs.

[MichaelC-15022]

Good stuff--sounds like you're on the right track then, all around.