Fiverr and Sponsored Guest Posts a Match Made in SEO Hell

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Fiverr and Sponsored Guest Posts – a Match Made in SEO Hell

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So – I went and did it. I’m very ashamed for even having tried – but I went and researched sponsored guest posts on Fiverr. As an SEO guy – Fiverr has always been – to me – synomous with everything that’s wrong with the SEO industry. People that have no business or expertise in SEO – but for some reason get an SEO contract (whether it fell into their lap or they actually started a half hearted SEO consultancy) – get paid – and then take that money and buy a bunch of SEO Fiverr gigs. 

Personally I had never even researched or considered it – however I was in the process of reaching out for guest posts and I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to see exactly what was on offer from Fiverr. This is a post to show you the depraved depths of using Fiverr in the SEO landscape – and will hopefully not only show you why you should never sink as low as I did – but also why Fiverr in general is a bad investment for SEO.

Even When It Costs More than A Fiverr – It’s Still Not Worth It

The name Fiverr refers to a $5 gig – however if you go to the Fiverr website you’ll find there are many gigs which cost a lot more than that. In fact some Fiverr gigs can go for thousands of dollars. In these examples I’ll be looking at gigs in the $5 – $100 range – and I’ll only be looking at sponsored posts. 

Also I won’t be “naming and shaming” any specific sellers – I will say however that I didn’t find ANY good sellers – also note that this article will focus on buying sponsored guest post opportunities on Fiverr specifically. 

Fake Sites For Sale

When it comes to buying sponsored guest posts on Fiverr – there are sites that may be over saturated with backlinks – or there may be sites that are not that powerful. But the worst offender that you have to be aware of are sites that aren’t really sites at all. 

There were quite a few sellers that were selling links on PBNs (which are basically sites that are setup for the sole purpose of creating backlinks) and passing them off as real sites. It’s pretty easy to spot these fake sites because they literally have no personality and no information about them whatsoever. Here’s an example screenshot:

You can see the ‘About Us’ section literally has no links to anything about the site – no history, nothing that can be tracked down. In other words it’s a fake site created to fool Google into thinking it’s real so that backlinks can be sold on it.

The interesting thing is sites like this were packaged along with more legitimate sites by the sellers – I’m not sure if this was done on purpose or nefariously (for example a seller might have 1 site that is completely legit and 8 sites which are absolute crap like this – he may actually have a legitimate offer on the 1 real site but make most of his money from selling the crap which is the other 8 fake sites).

What was amazing was how much was charged – for that site above (which is completely fake) you would be charged $60 (all though to be fair that would include an article). The statistics were pretty decent but the fact that it was not disclosed that it was a PBN was quite worrisome:

If You Can See It, So Can Everyone Else

In this article I’ve been nice enough not to disclose the PBN which was being sold on Fiverr – however think about all the people that spent their money on a guest post on this site. Anyone can lodge a webspam report and inform Google of the offending site – once Google is aware not only can they remove the site but penalize anyone that is associated with it!

Everyone Seems To Be Reading from the Same Script (The Saturation Problem)

What I found interesting was that despite the fact that I had approached multiple sellers – they all seemed to be pushing the same ‘legitimate’ sites. This was very weird – I’d be curious to know how all these Fiverr sellers get their marching orders but it all seemed very suspect. 

The problem with this is saturation. 

For example – let’s say your Fiverr seller gives you 8 sites – and 7 of them are crap PBNs (as discussed above) but 1 of them is ‘legit’. However that one ‘legit’ site is also being sold by 4 other sellers. Even if you were only to purchase the ‘legit’ site you would still get a site completely saturated with sponsored guest posts. Not only would it decrease the power of the outbound links – but also open the site to being more likely to be penalized by Google for selling sponsored guest posts (remember – it’s against Google policies to pay for sponsored guest posts). 

Fiverr is not the place to look for sponsored guest Posts

In summary I did not purchase any Fiverr sponsored guest posts – I really wanted to give it a chance – and Fiverr’s issue is just like many other sponsored guest post directories – eventually they will get saturated and lose their power. 

My suggestion is to reach out to sites in your niche directly. 

Good luck!

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January 26, 2020 at 09:44AM