Cash for Links, it Works but be Careful

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 21 of December , 2007 at 8:57 am

The following helpful advice was taken from Marketing Pilgrim. I think it sums up some very good advice for those of you that want to build up traffic through link buying. Link buying is a strategy that works, but is increasingly frowned upon and tends to fall into the black hat category these days.

• Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb!
• If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
• If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
• Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it.
• Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
• Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too!
• Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
• Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
• Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
• I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about buying PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

These are some useful tips and if you are considering paying for links, then do make sure you go over them carefully. I think that the best piece of advice that can be gleaned from this is to be careful where you buy your links from. Your links are only as good as the reputation of the site that they are on.

Of course, the flip side to link buying is link selling. If you have a site with a strong ranking, it is possible to earn a great deal of extra income selling links. Do take care, however, as a whiff of scandal is all it takes to bring your page rank tumbling down. Why does Google frown upon link buying and selling, anyway, after all isn’t that what Ad Sense is all about?

Category: Link Building, Link Selling

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