Link Popularity - Fresh Idea

[is300]

So someone came to me the other day and said they had access to hundreds of websites that all had PR5 or more. He said they could build static optimized pages around my keyword, and place one page on one domain. (www.example.com/folder/my-keyword.htm) After the page was indexed by google they would then add a link to my site on the optimized page. The fee for this was pretty reasonable. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[edited by: msgraph at 1:54 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2005]
[edit reason] please use example.com for example purposes :) [/edit]

[martinibuster]

How did this person "come" to you? Is it someone you know or was it an email out of the blue?

[MarkHutch]

Buyer-Be-Ware

[wattsnew]

A link farm using other peoples' gardens!

[jorj]

How much did he ask for this?

[SEOMike]

Ditto what hutch said.

I'm always pretty leery about people contacting ME about selling links. 9 times out of 10 the gain is minimal, and the link doesn't last. Either the site goes down since they got as much money as they could, or the links are devalued / penalized by Google due to FFA or LF mentality.

Go looking for your own links... it's the safest.

[Pedent]

Also remember that sites don't have PR, pages do. This link from "a PR5 site" may not be from a PR5 page, even when Google has found it, indexed it, and given it some PR.

[peewhy]

pedent made a good point, a link to a PR zero page on a site with a pr5 homepage is almost as useful as asking Jeeves if he has a sister.

[ScottD]

You ask for fresh ideas. This one may or may not be totally fresh, but I'm about to do it, so I would be glad of any opinions.

We are developing a pdf format 60,000 word guide which will be available for free download and should be of interest to many normal people. You can actually choose which sections you want, so as to avoid the full download if thats too much. I hope to get about 30,000 downloads a month within a year.

Hopefully this will therefore be something that other sites (eg our competitors) would like to offer, so we'll make it easy for them to include a link to the page (the one where you select your sections), and give it away as if it were theirs.

This in turn gives our site a PR boost without giving any links back in return. I'd like to then use that PR to boost more commercial pages of ours.

Any comments?