Link building via Rafflecopter

[ChristopherGlaeser]

I received an invite from a company to enter a contest for a chance to win a prize.  The contest is run by Rafflecopter.  Rafflecopter looks interesting because you can place the contest anywhere including social sites and your own website.  Contestants can increase the chances of winning in various ways such as an FB like, tweet, etc.  The largest number of points (for this particular contest) are awarded for linking from your website to their website.  Given that the contestant must add the link to their website and the sponsoring company can not control whether they use nofollow, couldn't this contest approach to link building cause problems for SEO?  If the contest included instructions to copy and paste the html with a nofollow, that would seem like a better solution, but the only guidance given was to link to their home page.

Your thoughts?

Best,
Christopher

[Goulart]

Rafflecopter is a great service and we use it often when conducting sweepstakes that need to be hosted on websites instead of Facebook apps. Easy to setup and manage the giveaway.

We only use the following refer-a-friend options:

• Like Facebook Page
• Follow on Twitter
• Tweet the Giveaway
• Join our mailing list (business account)

We haven't used Raffelcopter giveaways as a way to link to our sites before. But if the sites that are linking to you are all low quality sites and Google doesn't give them much weight. I can't see it helping your SEO out. Google gives more weight to sites that are related, trustworthy and experts and most sites like that wouldn't join a Rafflecopter sweepstakes. Well I can't imagine New York Times or The Boston Globe doing it...

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks for the quick response.  Regarding links, I was more concerned about the potential for harm.  Google is smacking companies hard that use link building schemes that do not enhance the user experience, and earning raffle points in exchange for a link seems like a paid link.  Perhaps one way to offer points in exchange for a link is to provide a copy/paste URL that includes a nofollow.

Best,
Christopher

PS: Good to know Rafflecopter is working for you.  I may give it a try as well.

[LesleyPaone]

Rafflecopter is awesome for this.I have a client that does it regularly. What we do is add an option (one of the make your own entry options) that says something like "If you already own this product post a review for an entry" and other one we do is "Write a blog or forum post about the product for an entry"

I would say doing that we normally get 100 or so positive reviews on various sites and 30 or so blog posts / forum posts. We typically get about 1k people entering total. One thing we have been doing to further target is to post suggested review or forum sites to post on. I think it is borderline spammy, but I feel like it is on the safe side of the line.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks, Lesley.  I have used Wildfire and SocialAppsHQ in the past.  I can see the flexibility of awarding points could prove useful, plus the ability to host on our own web page.

Do you get any viral lift?  Do you promote (with $) your contests on FB or other social sites?

[LesleyPaone]

The viral lift sometimes, it really depends on the company and what the prize is. The company I do it for has a unique product that has a pretty big following. So people organically review it as good and write blog posts about it.

We have never promoted any with money per se. One thing I have found that works really really well is blogging. If there is a blogger in the market that has a lot of followers and they can be paid or given free product to make a blog post about the giveaway (along with a fb post and a tweet). Then that can work out well. We saw one balloon from 500 people entered to 3k people entered in one day because of that.

I don't tend to recommend paid ads, I like the subversive paid blog post, where people do not realize it is "sponsored". I feel people tend to believe it more and have found it works out better.