Some Link Buying Don’ts

• Never buy a link on a page with more than 10 other paid links, the fewer paid links the better on a page.
• Don’t link on a page with a notorious link buyer. Check the back links of some of the other link buyers on your link page. If there backlinks are clearly all paid links this puts you at risk if they get spotted by the SEs.
• Don’t buy links from large high profile link networks.
• Don’t buy links on a site that does not rank for their domain name.
• Don’t buy links on languages different then your website.

Some Link Selling Don’ts

• Don’t over sell any web page.
• Don’t sell to blatant black hat sites.
• Don’t sell to sites that are only propped up by paid links
• Don’t advertise you sell links on your site
• Don’t give out your URL to every potential link buyer. The fewer that know you sell links the better.

Since in content links are difficult to find, footer and side bar links will need to remain part of your link buying strategy. Just make sure you use a bit of common sense and caution and your chances of success will be much greater.

Before you decide on a few high PR links or more low PR links, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your site new?
• Is your site older but not indexed very well?
• How many one way links do you have now?
• What is the range of PR of the pages linking to you?
• Do you have lots of natural links?
• Are you ranking well for your money keywords or not at all?
• Is your site of value and worth linking too?
• Is your site making any money?
• Do you understand that PR is not the most important metric?
• Does your site have a lot to lose, or nothing to lose if your link strategy does not work out?
• What is your budget?

Only when you answer the above questions, can you decide on your link buying strategy. As you can see, it is not an easy yes or no question. The best way I can answer is that linking patterns must look natural. If you have a two page MFA site, it is not natural to pick up 3 or 4 high pr links out of the blue.

Link buyers need to realize that it takes several months to see benefits from a link purchase, the age of a link is one of the factors the search engines use in there algorithm to prevent people from buying links for a month and seeing immediate results.

If it was as easy is buying links for a month and bursting to the top of the SERPs an SEO’s job would be much easier and most of them wouldn’t be working so hard to scratch out a living and stay in business.

Webmasters should work towards a steady increase of links each month. Get the kind of links you can keep long term. Your links should be natural, relevant, in contextual, and long term. The buy and try strategy never works and ends up costing a lot of money. Why would a search engine count “fly by night links” when ranking your website.

Even if you get a link and it seems to give you a nice immediate boost – was the boost from the link? Was it from a normal shuffle of the SERPs? Did some of your competitors drop? Or did a nice text link that was pointed at your site last year finally start counting for you? Know one will ever know, certainly not you and your sample of one.

It is very important to work more on getting 5-10 one way links every month. Of course natural links will be the cheapest way to get these links to get these links so build a site that people want to link to. I’ll take an organic long term PR 2 link over a 1 month PR7 link any day. This is your surest way to search engine bliss.

When money is less of an issue it becomes possible to purchase test links from some very nice websites. These text links can and often will drive large volumes of traffic to your site. The down side of course to this is that they are expensive. Now buying link advertising can be done using several different avenues on the web.

Many high quality websites do allocate a small amount of space on their highest ranked pages for text link ads or banners. These spaces are offered for sale at a price that is inline with the sites quality.

Another common place where text links can be purchased is on the paid directories. These directories are pay as you go type operations. They may offer one time payments for inclusion to these directories or in some cases they may require a webmaster to pay a regular monthly fee. The costs for these types of programs are of course dependent on the amount of authority the directory has and the specific category that was chosen for your website.  You will often finds that some link categories are priced more expensively then are others.

Of course, LinkAdage is a great place to buy and sell text links.  You can be sure you are getting fair market value because of our auction based selling format.  Other text link brokerage sites work much like a catalogue shopping site. They list the links that are available and indicate how much the link will cost on either a monthly or yearly basis. Still other sites offer package deals. They may get you any where from 100 to 500 one way links back to your site for a fixed monthly price.

Like any other media advertising, purchasing text links has to be done by someone that really knows the web and knows how to assess or measure traffic to a website. Purchasing a link may often prove to be an expensive way of generating traffic. It is also one of the fastest ways of generating traffic. The key here is to always stick to your advertising budget and always measure the performance of all your ad campaigns very carefully.

When buying text link advertising, it is important to take into account the on-page position of the LinkAd. Many sellers offer prime sidebar locations and do not list this as a selling point, while inexperienced buyers tend to focus more on PR rather then the fact their link might be lost amongst 25 other links in the footer of a site. To help both buyers and sellers of text link advertising we are adding a new Link Position metric to the auctions. This metric will be another drop down choice where link advertising sellers can easily indicate the on-page position of their text link advertising.

Better LinkAd position on relevant pages mean more targeted click throughs and possibly more importance of the link as calculated by the search engine algorithms. While in-content links are always the best, links “above the fold” on the web page site bars are also ideal link positions.

To visually see the power of various link positions, please see our LinkAdage Link Power map and color code key below. In general, the higher the number and the darker the red, the better the Link Advertisement location.