Review of ReviewMe.com
Note: this post is a paid review of the ReviewMe.com site.
I was reading Aaron Wall’s blog over at www.SEOBook.com, and saw a new post about a service that he himself had actually released (I assume he is part of a team). The idea is a very cool one, and reminds me of what the founding principles for text link ads were just a few years ago. At that time, straight text links were really the key to high search engine rankings, and SEOs (as well as regular old web masters) were throwing money at anyone with a high PR site.
Today, what SEOs and site owners are looking for with regard to Google is a little more difficult to find. People are looking for contextual, relevant links that are incorporated into text and are on quality sites. Quality sites is no longer synonymous with high PageRank; today, the quality of a site is dependent on a number of factors, perhaps most importantly the concept of “Trust.” Is the site linked to by reputable sites? Does it have a natural linking structure? Or does it look like another SEOd spam site? The links you want are the ones from the most legitimate sites.
To the best of my knowledge, prior to the release of ReviewMe, no company has served as a facilitator for finding these kinds of links. I love the ReviewMe idea, which is essentially that blog owners could earn money by writing reviews of relevant sites on their blogs. The owner of the site being reviewed would then pay the blog owner and get a quality, contextual back link in return. All around a great deal, and a great company idea.