From the early days of digital PR and SEO, I’ve made the point that SEO (search engine optimization) is primarily a PR function. After all, it’s largely about visibility and reputation management (being found via search engines, and managing what ranks for your brand or name).
My hope was to encourage fellow PR professionals to embrace and learn about SEO. But things haven’t played out as I’d hoped. Rather than legitimate PR people collectively building a strong understanding of SEO, I’ve seen countless shady SEO folks masquerading as fake PR firms.
And if you aren’t careful as a freelance writer, these fake PR firms could cost you clients.
What These Fake PR Firms Do
When sketchy SEO folks re-brand themselves as PR firms or solo PR pros, what they do is try to manipulate media mentions for clients. They don’t do real media relations. What they do is more akin to spam.
One popular strategy often targets freelance writers.
In this case, they look for freelance contributors to large online media outlets (could be anything from the digital version of a traditional magazine to a popular blog). They contact these freelance writers and offer to pay them to place a link to their client in one of their articles, or possibly cite them as a source or conduct a review.
Why This is a Problem
Here’s what these fake PR firms ask freelance writers to do:
- Take their payment.
- Feature their clients in some way.
- Don’t disclose the payment, which is essentially a sponsorship.
If any party is in the U.S., this would be a blatant FTC violation. If you take payments for content or links, you need to disclose that to readers.
How These Fake PR Firms Could Cost You Clients
The disclosure issue is bad enough. But because these fake PR firms tend to target freelance writers working for large publications, they also put your relationship with those publications at risk.
These schemes are fundamentally a conflict of interest.
Your typical publication clients won’t permit freelancers to take separate payments that influence editorial decisions. And if they wanted to sell sponsored content or links, it would go through them, not you. It’s not your publication to sell sponsored placements in.
These fake PR firms tend to target large outlets that hire many freelancers. A certain business-oriented site is often hit (not one I consider respectable given their history, but SEO people see value in getting links there).
The editorial staff caught on to these unnatural brand and link placements, and for years now they’ve ended relationships with freelance writers caught taking these third-party payments. (I even know a colleague let go by them when they didn’t do this, but it was discovered one of their prior clients was engaging in this manipulative behavior with other writers.)
So as tempting as it might be to take their payments, working with these fake PR firms can cost you freelance clients. Publications have been wise to this scheme for years.
Remember, this kind of undisclosed paid placement is not PR. It’s not even good SEO. It’s a form of black hat SEO, and it could end even long-term client relationships if you don’t understand the difference or choose to engage with the fake PR firms anyway.
