SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #18

Posted by Justin Smith at 9 April, 2007, 7:04 pm

Here is Today’s Tip:

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An always controversial way to get links: Buy them. This is pretty straight forward… you decide what kinds of sites you want linking to you, and you go about purchasing the links.

Most of the sites that offer text links are very detailed in their offerings. Most listings will offer information like:

Description of the site (type of content on the site. Real Estate, cars, news, etc.)
Date the site was begun
Alexa Ranking
Page Rank (PR)
Whether it is a home page or sub page
Number of quality incoming links
How many links that will be accepted
What part of the page the link will be listed on and number of characters

Based on these factors, you can usually find links that would be a pretty good fit for you. The primary issue is probably price for most people. Some links can get very pricey depending on the quality.

The other issue has to do with Google’s position on link purchasing. For the sole purpose of raising search engine results it is definitely looked down upon by Google. There is actually very little evidence to show that Google has penalized sites for doing this (probably because it is hard to track down), but it is still a risk. Most of the companies I’ve found go through extraordinary lengths to protect client’s identities from the search engines, and thus avoiding penalization.

I haven’t personally purchased any links, although I’ve been sorely tempted by some PR9 links. But when it comes down to it, $1,000/month just isn’t worth it when you are only buying for the SEO benefit.

My advice: Only buy a text link ad if you feel strongly about the quality of the page it is coming from, AND you think it will attract human visitors as well as boost your backlink count.

Here are a couple of the most popular link buying websites:

Text Link Brokers - Text Link Ads - Link Adage - Live Customer