Online press coverage: publications asking for fee to add backlink. Should I pay?

[AndJH]

For the last few years I've been gaining steady backlinks for my clients by producing online press releases for them (e.g. publishing results of a survey they commissioned, or their expert opinion on recent news, etc). The online coverage included a backlink naturally or by me just asking the publication nicely.  But recently I'm finding that publications are asking for a fee to publish the article (with a link) or they will publish the article for free, but will add a link for a fee.  Note: these publications aren't link-building-sites, they're good DA sites such as  https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ and  https://www.moneymagpie.com/  (MOZ DAs of 80 and 56 respectively). The fees are around $200 each.

The clients can afford to pay for this type of coverage, but is there a risk in these cases with Google?

[paints-n-design]

Do you wanted to ping google? I mean ....  I can read you ask if it is ok to spent 200$ for a followed link? Or is it nofollow, no problemo in this case.

[FungiMarketing]

I don't see any 'nofollow' in their external links, which is a good thing.

_Ex: https://www.moneymagpie.com/make-money/how-to-make-money-as-a-prison-consultant - search for the prisonconsultants domain and use inspector to see the source code. _

Spam scores for this site is also low (1%) so I don't think you would be penalized.

From a tracking perspective, you will not see traffic attributed to the referrer because of the rel="noopener noreferrer" tag in the anchor ref, so source will show as 'direct'. I think it would be a good experiment. Let me know how it goes if you do end up doing this, may use for some of my clients as well.

• Ryan

[AndJH]

Thanks Ryan. Yes, the impression I get is that they either add a do-follow link for a fee, or it's no link at all.

So I guess a sensible approach might be to simply look at each publication's domain score and the content they publish and make a judgement about whether they look/feel legitimate rather than them looking like they are just in it for selling links?

[AndJH]

It's for a followed link.  If I don't pay, then they don't add any link at all (or simply don't publish the article at all).

[FungiMarketing]

Yep. Sounds about right to me. I'd also check the relationship of their content to your client's industry. The more relevant the better. If you're paying for it, I'd also request they use specific SEO-friendly anchor text.

_Ex: rather than hyperlinking the root domain (prisonconsultants.co.uk) would be better to hyperlink 'UK prison consultants' or something similar. _