The Downside of Outsourcing link building.

First let me say that we all need outsourcing at some point in our IM lives and there are many good high quality outsourcers. However after speaking with some people who PMed me recently I thought it would be useful to explain how and when outsourcing can be a bad thing. Perhaps we have the desire to outsource too much.

You need to understand that everyone is trying to make as much money as they can and outsourcers often competing on price are no different.

When placing links it can be critical that you get the most bang for your buck. From what I have seen recently with my own eyes many outsourcers take a shortcut that can dramatically reduce that bang and I wonder if thats one of the reasons why people are reporting their linkbuilding campaigns falling flat.

First, You NEED to ask and check that when an outsourcer leaves a link for you on a page that he is only leaving your links. If to save time he (or she) is droping several links on one page then he is diluting the juice that that link will give you. I've now seen pages where multiple links are being left on a page. Sometimes as many as six and seven or more and obviously not for the same venture. These are not front pages with Lots of juice to begin with. Dividing them up just waters out the effect especially on blog commenting where there are hundreds of people doing the same.

Second, You need to know whether your outsourcers have high integrity. It seems evident that some outsourcers use backlinks from your portfolio on other sites. I'm not going to get into specific outsourcers and why I suspect that but iF you have some backlink sites that you use because they are not being over run by other users going ahead and employing the wrong outosurcer can totally defeats your purpose. Your links will get into general circulation

Third, alot of outsourcers just don't take the time (and why should they really) and leave backlinks in such a way that they are likely to get Identified as spam and removed. Never expect a third party to take as much care for your business as you would.

So be careful out there and maybe your link building success will come back. Especially when you have some special links. Keep them to yourself and take a minute or two to place your own link. This is a critical part of your business and you are the one that cares the most about it.