I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about Fiverr, so I wanted to take a quick moment to express some of my thoughts on how websites like Fiverr – which essentially allow you to bring the cost of doing inane, repetitive crap down to virtually nothing – are changing SEO, for better or for worse (probably worse).
For those of you who have yet to experience the massive marketplace that is Fiverr, you can essentially find somebody, somewhere in the world, to do virtually anything you want for the low, low price of just $5. Why you might expect that most of the providers on Fiverr are from foreign countries (and many of them are) the site is loaded with individuals from North America offering everything from professional voiceovers to logo design to fresh content. It’s with this in mind that we take a look at Fiverr to see whether or not it’s worth investing in some of these gigs for SEO purposes.
Using Fiverr for Backlinks – as tools for generating backlinks become better, easier and cheaper to use more and more providers have jumped on the bandwagon and accordingly prices have shot to basically nothing for thousands of blog comments, links from forums, and social bookmarks. It’s relatively easy to find a provider on Fiverr who can generate anywhere between 1 to 60,000 backlinks for five bucks. These backlinks are relatively garbage in comparison to more expensive means, but they can be used for indexing and for the ever-so-meta backlinking of your backlinks.
Cheap Content – As virtually everyone thinks that they’re an accomplished writer, there’s no shortage of cheap, poorly written content available in many thousands of gigs on Fiverr. This content is perfectly useful for posting anywhere except sites that you actually expect people will read it. For instance, if you plan on doing some article marketing you can easily score some content on Fiverr that will be generally accepted at most places that you post. If you’re the type that likes your content spun, Fiverr also has a number of highly rated providers that can handle this.
Video / Audio Testimonials or Ads – This is one area where Fiverr can actually be quite useful and extremely inexpensive for the quality of material that you receive for your five dollars. There are a number of very highly rated video and/or audio content producers on Fiverr that happy to transform your script into a video advertisement, audio testimonial, or even something that sounds like one of those cheesy radio ads inviting you to the Dallas Mower Show on “Sunday Sunday Sunday!!!”
My personal favorite has to be this guy baldy, who offers a number of gigs in hilarious low-budget green screen format. Here’s a sample video that he put together with all of his characters marketing some cheap Obama sunglasses:
Logo and Graphic Design – Again, this is another area where you get far more for your five dollars than you ever would’ve thought possible. There are quite a few very capable graphic designers who are willing to create poster designs, logos, Facebook pages, and other graphics that you can make use of in your web or print marketing material. My favorite is hazeltree, who is very skilled at creating retro posters which at first glance might seem only suitable for hipster rock shows, but with a little ingenuity can be put to some very good use online.
So – what exactly does this have to do with how Fiverr is changing SEO? As more and more individuals and businesses are able to leverage extremely inexpensive links and content, the value that search engines place on these will have to come down accordingly. We all remember just a short year ago when Google decided that they didn’t like content farms anymore and the search results were shaken up quite significantly. Expect cheap links like blog comments, social bookmarks, forum profiles, wikis and more to continue to be devalued as their use for SEO purposes trends ever upward.
What are your thoughts? Are you leveraging Fiverr for SEO purposes for yourself or for your clients? Let me know in the comments below.