Need a referee on article links

[arainey007]

I need a referee on an issue.

I have hired a company that does a decent job of creating a social presence for our company and its web presence.   But the main feature I hired them for was to create and cast articlesinto the social sphere  with back links to our main site. This was based on a premise that backlinks still matter.

Instead the articles and posts they create are 1) posted on a separate url blog page maintained by them (but branded similar to our brand term) and 2)  casts out to other social sites with back links to their 'blog-type' site, not our main site.  In essence its a blog off the main url with articles/posts touting our product but linking back to the off site blog.

I have requested that all the articles created monthly by them and cast out into the social sphere containe anchor text appropriate hyperlinks to our main site, not the blog type site, and they are resisting.  I am willing to make a switch if the premise of creating links to my main site still holds in the SEO world.  Their assertion is that it doesn't.

They are getting the blog site to rank for certain key words that we also are trying to rank for and the blog site does  have links to our site on their site such as an "our website" button.  And they do create a lot of social activity buzz with twitter, youtube etc for our brand name.  In all i like what they do except in two months they have created 305 back links to the blog and our main site has only 8.  When they report they show me all the words the blog site ranks for, as if the main site doesn't exist.

But wouldn't best practice still be for them to create the backlinks to our main site, not the blog and worry more about how the main site is ranking, not the cast site?

Or has the SEO world changed so much that it doesn't matter.  I want to be fair but I am drwaing a line in the sand on this.

[irvingw]

Yes backlinks still matter.

Well it sounds like they are simply doing a different strategy than you expected. If you feel that the links they are getting are good clean quality links than I would opt to have them pointing to your main site (internal pages not the homepage, never link build to the homepage intentionally) - but if the links seem kind of dodgy then linking to a independent blog makes more sense because it provides a level of insulation against getting a penalty in Google. This is assuming that the blog is privately registered or under a different name, and on a different server as well.

I would make sure that the blog is optimized to drive traffic to your main site. Compare the total traffic numbers to the blog with your main site referring domain numbers.

Also, If they are linking to the blog and the blog is linking to you exclusively, you'll get some PR juice from the blog so all is not lost.

[EGOL]

Who owns the URL where the blog is located?

If they own it then they are being paid by you to build a brand that competes against you... and when you stop paying they will own a share of your business SERPs.

If you own it then you simply redirect the content to a folder on your own site and tell them to continue promoting.

Going back to the situation of them being the owner....  I think that you need to let them know that the content and promotion that you are paying for will be immediately redirected to a folder on your primary site.