: "Pay with a link" - ethical for SEO? There are a number of "Pay with tweet" type services where you get access to a download (pdf/ebook etc) if you tweet or Facebook like. Are there any

@Goswami781

It's not effective if you get caught:


Google works hard to ensure that it
fully discounts links intended to
manipulate search engine results, such
excessive link exchanges and purchased
links that pass PageRank.

www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736
However


Not all paid links violate our
guidelines. Buying and selling links
is a normal part of the economy of the
web when done for advertising
purposes, and not for manipulation of
search results. Links purchased for
advertising should be designated as
such. This can be done in several
ways, such as:


Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to
the tag
Redirecting the links to
an intermediate page that is blocked
from search engines with a robots.txt
file



So if you follow those guidelines you won't get SEO, but you may get visitors.

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@Pope3001725

This is definitely a grey area and I would think this could very well fall against Google's guidelines. You are manipulating the search engines by buying links. You may not be paying with money but you're giving something of monetary value to users to get backlinks. Those backlinks would never have occurred otherwise.

I'd avoid it for the potential to be seen as purchasing links.

I also doubt the links you get will be quality links. Sites that can potentially give you quality links almost certainly won't do something like this. Not too mention I would think most links would be from low quality and or off-topic sites. Those links would have very little value.

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