Precautions for Linkbuilding with Mommy Blogs

[ProjectLabs]

If you are seeking links from blogs in a niche that is known for having a lot of commercial links from reviews or sponsored posts what precautions should you take? Should you avoid any blog with sponsored posts or that reviews products?

[john4math]

I do this in the homeschooling niche.  The only precaution I take is to allow them to write whatever they want, and to not specify the anchor text they use when they link to me.  That way the links look natural, and they're lower risk for triggering any over-optimization penalties.

Not that a search engine can read intent (yet), but I don't do this for rankings; I do this for the traffic that comes from the post.  Since we're an education site, and lots of homeschoolers write about us anyway, so the relevancy of our site to the blog is high.  Also, a few sponsored posts don't look unnatural when there are also many natural posts and links about.

These blogs often have other sponsored posts and reviews, and a lot of them also do giveaways that I've participated in.  I haven't had any issues myself <knock on="" wood="">.  However, you never know when there could be another animal being released from the Google zoo!</knock>