Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If my question is, somehow, against the TOS......Please send me a "personal message" with an answer.
Sorry... i'm a big noob on this site. :-/
Don't buy high PR links. Buy lots of low PR links with anchor text. Try to stay away from run of site links.
Actually, I start liking this form of advertisement even more than reciprocal linking. Reciprocal links can induce for many firms image problems and are therefore not a good choice (suppose yahoo and msn-search would exchange links in their footers ;-).
For professional webmasters, I would recommend: Reduce reciprocal links, increase payed links (primarly for Traffic, of course). With great content you should receive enough natural links to receive good traffic from search engines.
Remo Uherek
Text link advertising isn't the end all be all, but if used properly, it can be a potent backlink (and traffic) building resource.
Just remember factor in relevance when choosing an ad...
I do have a question though.
Let's say I have a brand new site. I was told that it would be good to buy ONE text link on a site that is getting hit by bots (so I guess good PR) so my site gets found faster. This true OR is there a directory out there that you can pay for a listing (aside from Yahoo) and accomplish this?
Juggling tons of paid links for clients or even your one site can get a little daunting. You can't expect a link broker to let you know that 4 of your 30 links with them have dropped PR and "here's your new lower price" (alternatively, you usually can rely on them to inform and charge you more upon PR gains).
As above, drops in PR could be natural or could be part of a penalization or filter of some type. That said, the following can happen without drops in PR, you should also check your referrals from paid links in terms of spider visits and human visits. Major drops can spell problems and indicate you might do better to take your ad spend elsewhere.
While text link buying is now commonly associated with buying monthly billed, high PR links, the concept still includes paid submission to directories that offer static (or I guess other types of links too) link which often last a year or permanently. These can have tremendous value depending on any search engine ranking benefit they provide and more importantly any consistent traffic they send. As many are reporting that new (or sandboxed) sites often show those linking to them way ahead of them in the SERPs, why not stick your link on a major hub site that might rank well for your terms due to your link? While you're crawling up the SERPs, perhaps they'll rank and send visitors to you via your targeted listing.
High PR links aren't really necessary unless you need lots of pages indexed, your need constant fresh indexing (you're a news site, etc), or you are in a competitive area and need some icing on the cake. High PR can help in roundabout ways that have nothing to do with the above, but you'll have to ponder that one.
Newcomers, please, please don't spend all your advertising/SEO budget for one month of text advertising on a PR9 site or something like that. That's not going to be a magic bullet, and that's not going to appease the google algomonster.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:22 pm (utc) on Feb. 10, 2005]
[edit reason] Spelling [/edit]
1) You have a pr 3 site with apporximately 500 visitors daily. You sell green widgets. To place well within adwords, you have to spend $2 a click. You locate a on-subject page on another site selling links with a pr 4 or better, which is seeing 100 visitors daily or more. They want $200 a year. If you get clicked on by 2% daily from that purchased link that is 730 clicks per year. 730 * $2 = $1460. $1460 - 200 = $1260 savings. You save money, and you get a pr push.
2) You do a search for selected keywords, and the #1 postion is a content site yaking about green widgets (same pr), and this page has lots of back links. Nice page, very helpfull in understanding green widgets. Again, to place well with adwords you need to spend $2. A link on this #1 positioned site is $250/year. So, do you pay $250/year to show up implicitely at the #1 position with a pr push, or do you pay $2 a click without pr push.
Currently, there are three ways to show at the top of a search, 1) spend enough on adwords 2) build a site/pages which command the #1 spot 3) get a link on the page / site which shows up at the # spot.
Technically, none of the above listed are free. Each of us should do a cost and time analysis to determine where the value is. I wonder how many people pay themselves $1 an hour to build links free when they could buy a high value link for a couple of hundred, or less and spend their time earning $50 an hour doing some thing else?
Note on banners: In my webspace, text ads out perform banners 2:1.
All of this will only matter if your website starts ranking in a serious $$ SERPs. No one will complain about you or your "bought" text links if you are trying to rank for non commecial terms. But do that in competetive commercial SERPS and you will know that you are treading on a very tricky ground.
I am neither for nor against text links. Just trying to give my observations:-
1) If you are going buy text links from link brokers think about it carefully. The sole objective of the link broker would be to sell as many links as possible. Most of the times these links are given from the home page of a website. The more link the broker sells, the more probability of your site getting caught.
2) In my opinion it would be much more difficult to find a non internet savvy website owner (who incidentally has good pr on his webpages) and contact him to write an article about your page, or simple give you a link. You can pay him on monthly basis. As I said this is more difficult, but a very below the radar type of method of buying text links.
In the past 6 months, I have studied two cases of people buying thousands of paid links. In the first case, the site is either banned or not getting out of sandbox. In the second case, the site is kicking serious A**.
My two cents. :)
- avi wilensky
