A few times per day, I get a message that asks something along the lines of: “How much do you charge for a guest article on TechCrunch?” People are trying to get inbound links from TechCrunch for SEO reasons. The theory is: A link from TechCrunch gives your site trustworthiness in the eyes of Google, and so it’s worth doing. But is that what’s really happening here?
I know I should ignore these, after a few hundred of them, but then I received a message from someone who had paid someone on Fiverr, a site for freelancers, for a link on TechCrunch. He had gotten scammed and came to me to ask when I was going to publish the article. I was confused; apparently, someone had used my name as a contact at TechCrunch. Needless to say, I informed him that I couldn’t help and to take it up with Fiverr.
So then I wondered what would happen if I tried to buy an article on TechCrunch.
