How to ruin your website for $5 on Fiverr
John Wright 
Fiverr is a unique marketplace where people can buy or sell anything for $5. There can be some great deals that can be found on a site like this but it can also attract some low quality services and of course people that expect high quality services for just $5.
The saying can be true that you get what you pay for. Although there are some great gigs available on fiverr that cover a range of categories, there are some that lead new webmasters and those inexperienced with SEO down the wrong path. If you understand what changes Google has made to their search engine over the past few years you would know what can hurt your website's rankings. So before we reveal which gigs Fiverr.com recommends you buy to get traffic to your website lets do a quick overview of on page seo, link building and the 2 main google updates called Panda and Penguin. Webmasters are fully responsible for the content they create and write so this is one way you can control your own destiny when it comes to sales and also doing the part necessary to get your content to rank in a search engine. There isn't a whole lot you can buy on fiverr that would influence this unless you are buying articles from people. Then there is link building which not all webmasters have the ability to control. You can influence how you get links to your website but in many cases the links have to come from other websites that you don't own and usually never have control over. Google Panda update was created to punish websites with low quality content which can include things like pages with very little text, automated content and duplicate content as a few examples. Google Penguin update was created to punish websites for low quality links with many of them being comments on articles and link directories. Once upon a time these types of links were what you needed to do if you wanted to compete but now they will harm you. Google in theory doesn't want you to trick the system so their algorithm updates are meant to try to reward sites with quality content and quality links. Of course Google still has no problems in helping their own sites rank higher like youtube, google+ and blogspot but that is another story on their own bias. You can read more about the 2 main Google updates here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin 
So when having a browse at Fiverr.com one article from David Datny called Grow Your Business : 10 Must Haves my first reaction was what terrible advice to give to any webmaster with some of the suggestions as being recipes to ruining your website and possibly your site's reputation. Just looking at the article you can see some interesting gigs but there are a few that stand out as being absolutely horrible especially from an SEO point of view. Keep in mind this article is more of a sales landing page where new gigs are refreshed so there are changes happening often but despite the adjustment of gigs, there still seem to be some bad ones being suggested. So the page is deceptive to make it look like an article of recommended gigs to grow your traffic and for help on SEO.
1. Get Traffic
According to the quote from this section "More traffic means more revenues. There are great Gigs on Fiverr that can bring thousands of visitors to your business. Try them out!".
Gig 1: I will create 800 social bookmark SEO backlinks + ping in 24 hours for $5. This gig by user spookseo has an impressive 100% positive rating with 5767 votes which is probably a minimum of 5000 orders for this gig lifetime. Very popular! This gig claims they will help you "DOMINATE the Google search results, this gig will give you BIG results!". I like this phrase too "All links GUARANTEED to be Penguin SAFE." For an extra $5 "I will create 50 blog posts on a private blog network, pointing to your site". Another $5 will get you 15 manual backlinks from PR9 sites. This is the type of gig that can ruin any website. Just do a search for any "seo penguin google" search and look at the articles that talk about what types of links will ruin your website. Over this summer I had a contact that eventually became an SEO client. In the summer they were interested in chatting about what I could do for them SEO wise but because they were happy with their current SEO who delivered results by creating hundreds of bookmark links per month, they felt they didn't need me. I did tell them to reach out if they do ever lose their rankings. A few months later I get an urgent call that their site has lost their search traffic. Those bookmark links that initially helped them in the short term are now a semi-permanent problem. The links cost them $150 per month but after asking if they could be removed, they were presented with a $2500 offer to remove the links. Regarding the 50 blog posts on a private network and the PR9 links. I can't say if this is for the purpose of sending traffic for the blog posts or simply for link building but there are enough articles floating about where link networks have been targeted by Google with the customers getting zapped in the rankings. Here is a recent article from the Dave Naylor blog (@DaveNaylor): http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-reveal-backlinks-com-latest-casualty-of-private-link-network-cull.html Gig 2: I will add your site to 1001 social bookmarks high quality backlinks, rss, ping for $5 This user has a 100% rating, over 100,000 gigs ordered with over 20,000 positive votes and currently has 386 orders in queue. Their description of the gig is as follows: "Huge Page Rank, Authority Backlinks, Dominate Google Increase Your Ranking, Traffic and Leads with CrorkService". They claim it is the most natural search engine friendly technique and does not look spammy and Google always rank higher. Damn I didn't know you could dominate Google for $5. I really don't know what you are going to get with this. There are hundreds of smaller social networking sites where every profile is a chance for a link. Maybe these links won't be as bad as bookmark links but no matter how you look at this gig, were looking at probably link spam. Having your site listed on hundreds of social media sites would definitely get you some traffic, but would this traffic convert? Probably not unless you are a dating site and it is possible this type of link building could lead to a penalty.
2. Social Marketing
There are some very good gigs for social media like getting people to create Facebook fanpage designs, or give you guides on social media marketing but lets look at some bad ones. 
Gig 1: I will write a LinkedIn Recommendation for your LinkedIn Profile Gigs like this I would never recommend and there are tons of people willing to sell their reputation for $5. I've been asked by people to give them google reviews of businesses and services I haven't used or TripAdvisor recommendations of restaurants I don't like. I expect these review sites and networks to combat this type of spam and I've seen some Google reviews disappear because of fake reviews. I personally believe many people can see through fake reviews and it isn't the way to go.
Here are a few articles on fake reviews and reputation management that might make you want to think twice about paying people to recommend you:
Fake reviews earn fines for reputation management companies
Local SEO Case Study: Amy's Baking Company
Gig 2: I will build Powerful Social Signal from TOP Social Media Sites to Boost Seo Ranking for $5 Another popular gig that offers 1000 facebook likes, 100 Google Plus shares and 100 twitter tweet/retweets. This is simply spam and will probably not result in any traffic at all. Some of these likes or followers you get could look bad as well. If you have a good produce or service to sell, then you want real followers and real traffic.
They claim this gig will boost your SEO performance and that it is Penguin v2 and Hummingbird Google s Algorithm Safe. Not quite the best English writing there but you get the point. A few other gigs that I wouldn't recommend are buying followers and likes.
3. SEO
Here is where you can really destroy your website's search traffic and it only costs $5. Great deals and lols. 
Gig 1: I will build an eminent backlink pyramid good youtube seo for $5 Nearly 50,000 gigs sold. This person uses Senuke x and xrumer. They will send 300 backlinks to your site, then 4700 backlinks to those 300 links with 90% as dofollow and publicly viewable. For an extra $10 they'll increase it to 8000 backlinks Tier3 back to Tier2. Gig 2: I will manually do 20 Pr10 SEO high pr backlinks I don't know where this person gets their PR10 backlinks but this is another way to get your site into penalty trouble. Having a quick look at some of the other gigs, the titles are just horrendous.
6. Press Release
Press releases were popular with SEOs many years ago because it worked. Now press release sites are considered a low quality source of links. 
Gig 1: I will submit your press release to 50 TOP pr sites This equates to link spam. It might not send traffic although I'm sure if you do it right, it is possible but this is old school stuff and I wouldn't recommend it. Years ago many SEOs were all over press releases for building links but now these links are just not as special as they used to be. All the rest The Graphic Design section is decent and nothing there you could do to harm your site. The Video Marketing section also has some great gigs. The Website & Blog Content section seems to have a mix of low quality and high quality writers. The Design & Build Your Site also has an interesting mix of gigs, some of them are worth buying. The Illustrations & Animations gigs are fun ones with a lot of great value in some of them and the last section of Narration & Voice Over has interesting gigs.
Will Fiverr gigs hurt your SEO efforts?
There are some decent gigs to be found but some of the ones for traffic, social media and SEO are horrible. Fiverr is making 20% commission off of all sales so they probably don't care as much what you do with your website but when they have gigs that are selling, Fiverr seems quite happy to let you know about these great offers because lots of sales plus high ratings must be good for you. Fiverr is just the market place so it is always up to the webmaster to decide which gigs are good for them and which ones are bad. The unfortunate part of this situation is that webmasters that don't know SEO well, think they can get high rankings when someone offers it to them for a price. These too good to be true deals are the type of gig that will always sell and when these webmasters get burned, they learn the hard way and in some cases have to start over. I have worked with enough clients who have lost search traffic from penalties and the reasons are usually the same, low quality links and some of these cases the links were all bought from Fiverr. I have even seen other SEOs that work in gaming charge 5 figure monthly invoices while they bought their links off of $5. Sure enough that gaming company isn't online anymore. I am not saying don't use Fiverr, actually Fiverr is popular with many webmasters but when I see the article or a landing page by Fiverr to suggest gigs that will help you get more traffic, I really think this article should be reworded differently as they are endorsing these gigs as ones that will help you for SEO and traffic generation when many of them will completely ruin a website. It is possible that a website can be ruined with as little as $5 and for $100 you could cripple your website and force yourself to start all over. Perhaps on the positive side for those SEOs, there is always cleanup work available to help webmasters recover from penalties and making some of these $5 mistakes thinking their rankings and traffic can benefit for only $5. Quality content and quality links take time and effort and if it great traffic could be achieve with a $5 budget then all of us webmasters would be truly be working a 4 hour work week and living large. If you pay just $5 for SEO then you might be lucky if you get your money's worth on it.
Need an SEO and you have a budget larger than $5?
Try HorseshoeAgency.com lead by yours truly. Come to us if you are tired of low budget results and want help to get more traffic to your website. If you are interested in reading about more SEO articles here are a few goodies:
