The idea of Xomba is enticing. They offer you revenue sharing to write a couple blurbs or articles about your website or online writing projects. In other words, they pay you to do what you would for free. Is it really worth it? Does it work?
The first thought you may have is if this program is a scam. How can a website afford to pay you for such little content and quality backlinks? The answer is simple. You are creating their website for them. Xomba has a base website and through a little ingenuity, they get users to build their website for them. This will help them increase the amount of natural traffic they receive from search engines by appealing to every possible topic. They then host ads on your little blurbs and provide you with some of the Adsense revenue earned from the webpage that you created. A website of this size will attract many quality backlinks and thus your work will receive a large audience due to the pagerank of Xomba.
So far Xomba sounds like a dream come true. But do the links they provide help or hurt your SEO attempts? I will be able to provide no answers to this dilemma but hopefully will illustrate the concerns that it raises.
Google increases your pagerank, and thusly search engine ranking and traffic, mostly on content and backlinks. It is common knowledge that getting too many backlinks too quickly can hurt your pagerank, or even get blacklisted from Google. But can the quality of backlinks hurt your website? Xomba has a pagerank of 4, so backlinks from this site should be coveted. The problem comes in the fact that you are compensated for providing links to you own work. Google does not see this as natural backlinks. Google may, in fact, see this as cheating and could hurt your website’s ranking.
In Xomba’s defense, you don’t have to post links to just your own work but you can promote others’ as well. This would lead Google to think that the links are more natural than previously described. If this is the case then we should all join Xomba and promote our websites and online writing as much as possible.
One day, Google may come out and actually tell us what goes into their algorithm to determine the legitimacy of a website. This way we can avoid useless promotion and save ourselves some time but until then we are left with speculation.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Probably the best policy to to provide links to others’ articles as well as to your own. This may be similar to bookmarking sites, where it’s always better to bookmark other articles in addition to your own, so you aren’t viewed as a spammer.