Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If so what results have you seen from this?
How much traffic have you gotten and how much has your revenue increased?
how much would you pay for this?
Some directories actually charge for giving you a link - say £100. Buying and selling links kind of sounds like buying PageRank to me. If you do, ensure they don't remove it at a later date, while you are still paying for it.
Have you ever paid for someone to host a link on their site?
The reasons for paying for a link are many, and some are better than others.
If so what results have you seen from this?
How much traffic have you gotten and how much has your revenue increased?
how much would you pay for this?
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:09 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2005]
Have you ever paid for someone to host a link on their site?
All the time, it's half of my job...
If so what results have you seen from this?
Hard to tell. We don't put tracking parameters on paid links since it dampens the weight it's given. But you can use a program to determine what sites people were at before yours, this is what we are in the process of doing right now. Solutions like this though are expensive.
how much would you pay for this?
We pay up to $200 a month for some links (Homepage PR 7 / ROS 36,000 pages) but remember it's not so much about the PR and number of pages as how relevant and useful it is to your users should they or the spiders find the links to get to your site...
Depends on your objective. even for an SEO link, I need to see 200% ROI at minimum to consider the link purchase "worth it".
I've offered to pay for links (and paid) by finding some real nice niche sites. Offer them a $100 or something and if you've found the right niche they're happy to pay. Either that or I can spend 3 days of my time trying to find as good of a link.
The most I've paid for a link is $500/year - but that was on a site with lots of relevant traffic. The traffic from the site alone makes the link cost profitable.
I got not only one link, but hundreds of links from that sites. I improved my ranking a lot.
BUT...
You must be careful, because that site owners did not inform me about the expiring date and I did not take notes. I disappeared from that sites and my ranking after few weeks ( 4-5 weeks ) decreased..
I contacted the site owners to be re-linked and I realised two bad news:
- there is a waiting list for that sponsorization ( they sell only 5 links from their home page )
- If and when a slot will be free, the prices is the double!
So that now I pay ONLY for a life time link.
I did a lot of efforts to regain my ranking. Now I got it. I get several one-time link, most of them free.
Be careful with what seem good Directories that require you pay one time fee: I see that google is banning them; several paid directories ( directory requiring a USD $ 10 to 50 / listing) now show 0 Google Page Rank.... They had 5 to 6 PR...
My final impression is: invest your time and money in good content ang get "natural" links; maybe try to pay Press release to inform the net about your new content.
Natural links are like an insurance for your ranking.
Like any other link, it will get your site spidered.
for sure - when someone ads a link to our directory they get spidered within a week or two - some within 48 hours. We also run a website design business and all our new clients just go in our directory and are quickly picked up and ranked. If we just submitted to Google "add to" page it takes much longer.
There are some site submit places that actually advertise "get included in Google" for $x within 7 days... and I suspect they just add the link to a spidered page...
Paying for links is better as mentioned there is not recip link required. Paid inclusion is still a great way to build inbound links - and it's better when its free!
What would you all recommend?(I constantly add articles, added to article directories, completed a press release, tried free link exchanges, etc...)
1. Everyone does it, so you have to keep doing it to stand out - thus it's a potentially never ending process. The value has got to be questioned!
2. Articles can only appeal to article copiers and stealers and attracting the 'wrong' type of visitor that is unwanted.
3 Doing it hardly ever converts to a sale, as only reason for visting your site is to get the article for their own agenda.
4. Posting hoards of articles doesn't make anyone an expert, and the quality of some of the articles I get every day is laughable and could be considered as 'spam'.
5. Might be a free link in it, but the practise being so widespread - it kinda loses it's 'edge' as a marketing tool. Do you really want the person that clicks on your url at end of the article thinking that your desperate? It might actually cost you a visitor or a more importantly a sale.
6. You would need to post at least 10,000 different ones for it to be worthwhile, and maintain that number constantly for it to work and keep ahead of the game.
Waste of much valuable time in exchange for the value of traffic gained.
7. One theory of why article banks exist isn't to necessarily 'help' anyone, but to charge others to post articles. As so many do it, it must be conceivable that the ones after the free links, DON'T have the ad budget anyway, so the last thing they will do is to puchase anything from the article resources or the poster themselves.
Any effectiveness as a traffic driver is short term and very questionable.
Pardon me MB (delete it you must) but your entire attitude Event King is one of "if I can't do it or it wasn't a massive success for me, it must not be doable or work for anyone" and overall negativity.
I'm not naive enough to think that because something doesn't work for a specific business model or person, that it means it can never work as a whole for anyone or anything.
- People can get free one way links from good sites
- Articles do have their usefulness from certain standpoints and objectives
- It *is* possible to get an insane amount of backlinks for the right site
You will likely respond to me with nastiness as I've come to expect that from your posts. My concern is that other people take what appears to be bitterness at not being as successful link development wise as competitors and will be brought down in morale by the constant negativity in your posts.
Link development is like sex - everyone can do it. Not everyone can do it well.
Have you ever paid for a link?
Yes, all the time but never with any $$$. Just time and/or sweat :o)
Only for sitewides to competitors' sites ;)
(I'm kidding, OK, I'm kdding)
Cheers :-)
You're late. Link directories have gone out of favor.
I agree. Which means owners can't expect a great deal on selling them. If it's cheap to buy directories then I see that as an opportunity and I currently buy directory sites. I believe it's a good move at this time especially if you can find a good alternate/non-conventional use for an erstwhile directory.
Link directories have always been sold on the promise of raising PageRank, being spidered by SE's or for one-way link purposes. But now everyone's doing the link swap thing like crazy, so I guess that's one reason why the link directory idea has diminished over time.
..."don't link to bad neighborhoods". What is a bad neighborhood?
And could someone please define "scraper site"?
I looked in the glossary and couldn't find the terms. Thank you.
A scraper site is a site created by software that goes out and copies portions of many websites, often sites that are ranking well for particular search terms, then takes all the pieces and reconstitutes them as a new website. Often they resemble a directory with excerpts from the sites they are listing, and give links to the sites they have copied.
The term scraper site comes from the term Screen Scraper. Some people erroneously refer to them as scrapper sites.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, gabbadogs!
The amount was about $300 per link, and IIRC, the directory was called Yahoo! ;-)
The good news is, just about all my links seem to have been "grandfathered in"... :-)
