You call it spamming because you can’t think outside of your SEO world. If people who sell links don’t put the no follow code on who can? Only they can.

But we buy advertising not links. Building our brand through links on web sites builds brand awareness. It’s up to the individual site owners to use the no follow (buyer’s have no control of that), not the purchaser of advertising. Once again the big picture is branding not linking. The more visibility we have on sites that are relevant the greater the chances of building our brand.

Small Business is a well respected branding website and certainly very relevant to us for advertising/brand building as I would think it would be for you as well. It makes perfect sense that we advertise there.

Google actually considers paid links spam, like the one you have here: http://www.smallbusinessbranding.com , top left, under featured sites, anchor text ‘branding’. That link is $1,200 a year, and took me 2 minutes to find it. They ask that you use no-follow on paid links so that the engine won’t count it as an editorial link, because it isn’t. Just like every link you posted in your 3 comments, including using ‘Branding Agency’ as your name.

You keep talking about passing PageRank, and I don’t think you actually know what it means. First, Page doesn’t mean webpage, it was named after Larry Page. PageRank is a lot more complex than what is shown on your browser toolbar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank . I believe you are trying to accuse me of manipulating page rank, so I will quote directly from this Wikipedia article, as I don’t think I could say it clearer myself:

“As links from higher-PR pages are believed to be more valuable, they tend to be more expensive. It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase a webmaster’s link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned webmasters that if they are or were discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other pages’ PageRanks). The practice of buying and selling links is intensely debated across the Webmastering community. Google advises webmasters to use the nofollow HTML attribute value on sponsored links. According to Matt Cutts, Google is concerned about webmasters who try to game the system, and thereby reduce the quality of Google search results.[7]”

So…

The editor of this website asked me to write an article. Allowed me to include branding related links on a branding related website. You choose to use those same phrases I used as links. Difference is you used the links within the comments of the blog post because it is an easy way to get your website linked. And blog comments 95% of the time employ no-follow on all links due to previous history of SEO spamming.

So, who is really spamming Scott?

Originally, the links weren’t going to be actual links, but instead the HTML code to add links, as I did here: http://www.kolbrenerusa.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/05/why-lie-i-need-links/ . But if you remember Susan, Wordpress converted the code when you posted it.

Susan thank you again for the opportunity, I’d love to do it again.

I think Brandon’s point was to state that “paying” for links is not always the best choice, however, he does admit in his post that he is guilty of doing it sometimes.

I don’t think guest posts would be as popular if the guest writer didn’t have an opportunity to promote their brand/website through links, and it doesn’t bother me. In fact, I expect it.

Could there have been a better way to incorporate those phrases into his post to make them look less obvious? Probably, but I think Brandon’s approach was kind of funny. He says at the end of his post, “Why lie? I need links,” then followed that sentence with his three branding links. I actually laughed when I first saw how he incorporated the links. It seemed to me like he was poking fun at himself and linking in general more so than trying to covertly add unrelated links.

The article has nothing to do with branding. For him to throw 3 branding links in just to pass PageRank juice is hypocritical don’t you think?

If the anchor text was relevant to his article it would be one thing but 3 ambigious links for branding, corporate branding and branding agency are spamming in my humble opinion.

Don’t you think he was just throwing those 3 phrases in there just to pass PageRank juice? Be honest, what did those 3 phrases have to do with his article?