With Google taking a hard stance against paid links, some SEOs are getting creative with workarounds. One such “workaround” is the “pre-sell page.”
First of all, what is a pre-sell page? Basically, it is a page that you craft with the titles/descriptions/text and most importantly – links to your site with the exact anchor text that you want. You then take this page and pay a site in a similar industry/niche to put it up on their domain and link to it from one of their pages (generally somewhere on their home page) and on their XML sitemap.
Are these paid links? Well… yeah! 😉 However, proponents of this tactic argue that no one except spiders generally find these pages so it’s not as likely to get reported, particularly if you are sure to link out from this pre-sell page to some other similar pages within your niche (such as Wikipedia articles or some .gov’s or.edu’s or other authoritative sites). Often times the pre-sell pages will hide the links to the owner’s page in the text, and despite this link-hiding, supposedly the spiders will see the links to the owner’s page with the same trust as the others. Apparently these pre-sell page links will continue to give you link love for as long as it is up and linked to. I have heard some folks getting pretty dramatic results using this tactic, particularly when they secure highly trusted domains to host these pages.
Personally though, as a white hat SEO, this tactic scares me. I’ve never done it and I don’t have plans to start. It still runs afoul of Google’s Guidelines, and as such, you run the risk of Google smacking you at some later date for the supposedly under-the-radar-tactics you employ today.
