Is Buying Links a Good Strategy?
October 30th, 2008Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to get that Pagerank 5 website to provide a link back to your new website? Not only could it drive quality traffic to your site, but it would also provide a great backlink for the search engines to find. Unfortunately, unless your website is truly groundbreaking, it is unlikely that a big website will be eager to just give you a link on their main page. Their webspace is too valuable to be giving free links that provide little return benefit for them.
Given this all to common dilemma, a market has been created for the buying and selling of text links. There are many different places online that will allow you to buy links on high-quality websites and they all usually work a little differently. The most common way for these link marketplaces to work is that you pay a set amount and receive a link for a certain period of time, like $5 for a month or something similar. As you would expect, the higher the Pagerank of the website and the higher the traffic, the more expensive the link will be.
I realize that at first glance, this tactic seems to be very appealing for a startup website owner. Buying a prominent link could really put your site on the map! Before you run off and start buying links, however, realize that this method of linkbuilding is considered by many to be in the realm of the “black hat” SEO tactics. Matt Cutt’s of Google has been very clear in his opinion on link buying….he doesn’t like it. Neither does Google apparently. If Google is able to tell that a website is selling links, it will sometimes penalize that website and anyone who has bought links there also. I’m not telling you this to scare you away from this tactic, but it is something that you need to consider and be aware of when buying web links.
Now that I’ve gotten my little disclaimer out of the way, let me say that I do not believe buying links to be a bad thing in most cases. People buy and sell advertising every day, and link buying can be looked at as form of advertising. There are some webmasters that do sell links that are clearly not providing any benefit for their readers, but the majority are shown just as advertisements would be. The major difference is that advertisements generally include a “nofollow” link attribute and do not pass Pagerank to your website.
If you do believe that buying text or other links would be beneficial to your website, here are a few guidelines for you to keep in mind when shopping for links.
Domain Age: Generally speaking, the older a domain is, the more favorably the search engines will view it. When considering websites, use a tool such as archive.org to see how long the website has been in existence. Try to get links from the websites that have been active for the longest period of time.
Relavance of Website: Make sure that the website providing the link is relevant to the page you are linking to. A link from a completely unrelated website will not do much good in terms of your search engine rankings and Pagerank.
Placement: If you are purchasing a link that will be on only one page of a website, make sure that page has the Pagerank and other attributes that you are paying for. If the main page of a website is PR 5, but your link is on a PR 0 page, you won’t get much benefit.
Number of Backlinks: It is also helpful to research the number of backlinks that the website has from other sites. This will be shown to some extent in the Pagerank of the website, but PR is not updated all that often and can be inaccurate. A website with more backlinks pointing to it is a better candidate for purchase than one with fewer backlinks.
There are others things to consider as well, but they are more obvious. I certainly hope that you consider the Pagerank and quality of any website that you are buying a link from. Also be sure that the links are not “nofollow” links, as these will provide your website with very little benefit. It is rare that you will receive much traffic from users clicking on the link itself. Most of the benefit you are buying relates to SEO and improving the Pagerank of your website.
