There are many blog and website services that offer reviews of your site; some for free and some charge a good amount for their service. There are some top named bloggers that earn a reasonable living just from the review side of their business. However, are they of any value?
To answer this question you need assess why it is you would get a review in the first place. Is it to get more traffic; gain a back-link; or simply as a part of a marketing exercise? The second question then needs to look at who is going to do the review. Blog and website services offer reviews as either published critiques or as simple assessment type reviews. The later is frequently offered attached to a marketing campaign to recruit to new clients for SEO and web design companies.
Traffic: If you are looking to gain more traffic then your review must be published and be on a site that has a good traffic flow. No matter how good the review is, if there is no traffic then that is what you will get your share of: remember, 50% of nothing is still nothing.
Links: Having a review done to obtain links can be a good idea. You do however need to be aware of search engines like Google who don’t like reviews and links – classifying them as paid links. You may however find that the site doing the review has good traffic which flows on to you. If you can gain links from these visitors then a ‘nofollow’ link on the review may be of great benefit.
Promotion: If you are having a review done as part of your marketing strategy then don’t be afraid to have the link as ‘nofollow’; Even better if the ‘nofollow’ is in the robots file. If the review is syndicated at all then your will get link benefit from the syndication.
Assessment: A review that is undertaken for assessment may not be a published review. These are undertaken to assess your SEO, design and general user friendliness of your site. They can be quite valuable if done without future financial motive in mind.
Reviews can be valuable if undertaken for the right reason by the right people. A review for the sake of a review from a site that is really looking to use you as content may not be in your best interests in the long run. Blog and website services can offer good reviews of your sites if you are thinking of upgrading or getting into some serious search engine optimization programs.
