Did e-consultancy outsource its link building?

Having been doing some research into the value of directory links and places to find some good ones recently. On our travels we found various blog & forum posts talking about the value of directory links for SEO, whether we should be doing them at all and the net result of such activity.

While searching around we were a bit shocked to have found a report from a Canadian SEO company which looks like it has worked on behalf of e-consultancy.com (which now redirects to http://econsultancy.com) at some point in the past. I've put the link below for you to take a look at yourself as well as showing an image below.

Take a look for yourself - http://www.seocompany.ca/submission-package-report.html


What we don't know is when this report / web page was first put together. Judging by the fact that it refers to Microsoft bCentral which is now long gone, we would imagine that it is a couple of years old. What I think it is safe to say, is that e-consultancy.com is definitely credited for links and is also being charged 'labor' for time spent getting the links.

What puzzles us is why a website of such power and repute would outsource its link building? With so many paid subscribers, over 13,000 followers on Twitter, other blogs and huge credibility in the SEO world, the gathering of links should be almost an after thought as they have so many. Why they needed to pay for someone to get them seems odd to us.

If anyone could shed some light on this, it would be interesting to know more about what happened.