Buying Text Links - Good or Bad?
I am sure anyone involved with SEO has either bought text links or has at least considered doing it before. There are many methods of buying links online and some methods are more safe than others. Find out how to buy links safely and which methods to stay away from.
Link Building
Building links is by far one of the most difficult aspects of SEO simply because of a lack of control. You have total control over your website, the content, and HTML structure; however you do not have control of incoming links to your website (unless you own the other website of course).
Link Building Methods
Incoming links usually consist of one of the following scenarios (in no particular order):
1. Someone just naturally linked to your website for various different reasons.
2. You paid someone for a link going to your website.
3. You submitted your website to an online directory or similar-type website.
4. You own another website and placed your link on it.
5. You posted comments or an article with a link back to your website.
6. You had a reciprocal link agreement with another website.
Overview of Non-Buying Link Building Methods
Obviously there are other types of incoming links, probably thousands if you got down to the nitty gritty details, but these are some of the most common. The 1st method, having someone naturally link to your website, usually provides the highest quality links however it is one of the most difficult methods of gaining links. Providing useful content or material that someone will want to link to is often called linkbaiting. The 3rd option consists mainly of online directories is an easier method of obtaining some links quilckly and is often useful for new websites, however the quality of the links are usually not the best. Option #4 is a good route if you have a large collection of websites. #5 is ok and can provide some decent links, and #6 should probably be avoided in most cases as search engines don't put as much value on reciprocal links as they do one-way links.
Link Buying Overview
That leaves us with #2, buying links. There is debate going on right now in the SEO industry about whether you should buy links or not. The main reason for not buying links is that Google can recognize those links and will not give you any credit for the link or even penalize you for it. The other reason is that overall the quality of links that you can buy are not as good as links obtained using other methods. Right up front I will say there is no clear answer on this subject overall, however you can often find a clear answer to specific link buying situations. There are three questions you need to ask yourself for every link buying situation:
a. Can a search engine determine if I bought this link?
b. Do I know exactly what I will receive once I pay?
c. Is the link I am buying going to help with my SEO campaign?
Examples of Good Link Buys
Yes, these questions are basically the questions that address the concerns for not buying a link and some may think you can not find the true answer but in most cases it is possible. Here are two good link buying situations, our examples will be for an 'SEO company':
1. You find a blogger in your area that blogs only about SEO, you send an email to the owner and offer to pay him $100 a month in exchange for posting a link on his blog in the right hand column with the text 'utah search engine optimization'.
a. Can a search engine determine if the link was bought? Not likely at all; since it is a custom website and the owner has other links going to his friend's blogs and other SEO resources a search engine would have a very difficult time knowing the link was paid for.
b. You were clear on where you wanted to have your link placed and the text, you should be fine.
c. Yes, since the blog is about SEO and not dog breeding or some other un-related topic this should help your SEO campaign at great lengths.
Overall: This is a very good scenario for buying a link and probably the best method. Contacting individual websites on your own that you know are related to your industry can be very profitable. The drawbacks are it is more time consuming and you may have to make several offers before someone agrees; however you will be suprised at how many people will accept money for a link. The other drawback in this situation, specifically a blog, is that the readers may find out somehow that you paid for the link and may look down upon your company or the blogger.
2. You find a text link broker that has an inventory of websites related to yours. You find a few websites and purchase links through their system.
a. This will depend on the link broker's programming methods. If the links are delivered via javascript, php, etc. you may run into the possibility that the links can be recognized by a search engine as a purchased link. If the link is strictly HTML you have a better chance of the search engine not knowing it was paid for.
b. Again this depends on the system; however usually you know what you are getting, but not the exact website in some situation. You may know it is a 'PR 5' website, with one link on the homepage and 40 links on subpage and the topic of the website is 'seo copyrwriting'. However usually you have enough information to make an informed decision on whether to place the link; as long as the information is reliable.
c. As long as you place links only on websites that are related to yours, are not 'spammy' and chock full of garbage links, and are strictly in HTML format you should be good to go.
Overall: This is an easy and quick method as you can sort through hundreds or thousands of potential websites that you know are willing to accept paid links. The main drawbacks are the quality of the links (which you may never really know until you try one for a few months) and the lack of information in some cases (not being able to see the exact website until after you purchase a link). You may also run the risk that the search engines have picked up on certain link text brokers and knows which links are purchased through them.
Link Buying Cautions!
Although the two above examples are fairly safe and effective depending on several factors there are certain situation and conditions you will want to avoid at all costs:
1. Never ever buy a link on a website that is not related to yours.
2. Never buy a link that you have to ask yourself if it will be worth it or not and you are left to wonder at exactly what you will get.
3. Do not buy links that are non-HTML based.
5. Obviously avoid 'link farm' type situations.
6. Carefully consider the value of the link and don't overpay.
7. Monitor your results for 2-3 months to determine if you should continue to pay for the link.
8. If possible buy links that include a link on every page of the website, not just one.
9. Buy links on websites that have few outgoing links and have valuable and useful content.
10. Try to keep links for a minimum of 3 months, don't keep changing websites that you buy links from as it takes a while for the search engine's to pick them up and add value to your SEO campaign.
Link Building/Buying Resources
note: I have not tried all of these personally, some I can vouch for but not all. Do your research and follow the above guidelines and you should be ok though.
1. Text Link Ads
2. Text Link Brokers
3. Link Adage
4. Link Worth
5. Great Link Directory Guide
6. iSnare Article Submission
7. Blog Ads
8. PRWeb Press Release Distribution
Feel free to comment or add your own resources for building links.
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Wow, another article landed in Search Engine Land's newsletter...impressive.
I recently dealt with Text Link Ads out of curiosity. The sites they offered were pure garbage. They were completely saturated with tons of outgoing links, some lacking any great content, and not to mention their prices were outrageous. Sad thing is I bet they make good money as well.
Posted by: Jordan Kasteler at March 26, 2007 09:19 PM
Jordan, that is interesting you tried Text Link Ads and found them to be of very poor quality, I was just in the process of trying them out myself, its good to have a heads up though so I don't waste too much money on them if it doesn't work out. I do agree it is very difficult to find good text link brokers. Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Eric at March 26, 2007 10:26 PM
Eric, I didn't actually try Text Link Ads so maybe you'll have a good experience!? I just found out what they had to offer and didn't like the looks of it one bit. I'd be curious to see if you found satisfaction in their service though.
Posted by: Jordan Kasteler at March 27, 2007 12:22 AM
Yes, I would agree that 80% or so of their websites are 'junk' and too spammy, however I did find a few that I had high hopes for. I also did notice that some industries had better websites for links than others. I'll post a blog entry in a month or so with the results of how well it worked or didn't work.
Posted by: Eric at March 27, 2007 07:36 AM
Great stuff, Eric. I appreciate you taking the time to put all of this together. I'll be interested to see the results of your follow-up post.
Posted by: Alex McArthur at March 28, 2007 10:03 AM
Great article, easy to read and to the point. Useful and bookmarked ;)!
Posted by: nishan at April 18, 2007 06:52 AM
I've used text link ads, and have found some good links. (Yes, there have been a few bad ones, but you just have to be careful about which ones you pick.) One nice thing is that they offer are complimentary custom proposals. Basically, you tell them the types of websites you want (industry, pr, etc.), and they'll put together a list of recommended sites. From this, I pick and choose which ones will work best for me. It's all about doing your homework to make sure you get good quality relevant links.
Posted by: Jen at May 16, 2007 01:37 PM
I've used text link ads, and found some good ones that I purchased. They worked well after about 2 or 3 months but the costs just kept going up and had to ditch them after about 8 months. I aimed to ensure the link was not on a page with many others and that it was close to the top and of course it was relevant to the site I was working on.
Posted by: Jayne at May 19, 2007 07:16 PM
