Link buying
What is link buying?
Link buying is the process of paying webmasters for the placement of a link or multiple links on their website. This action is done to influence the search results of Google and other search engines.
If for example you wanted to rank for ‘digital camera’, you’d buy links from different websites with the anchor text ‘digital camera’. The higher the PR and the more incoming links going into those sites you buy from and their relevancy to you, the more it will influence your position in the search engines.
Googles view on buying links
You’ve probably landed on this page because your SEO company is suggesting they buy links for you. Firstly, face facts – if you wish to rank for a competitive term then you must be prepared to buy some links. Your competitors are already buying them, that’s a fact.
Google openly talk about a sites ranking being partly based on incoming links from other websites. They don’t go so far as to say that links will ultimately make or break your ranking, but it’s a start.
Although your competitors are buying links, that doesn’t mean it’s safe to jump in at the deep end without some knowledge first! Your site could be penalised – It could be kicked out of the search engine completely or more likely just plummet in it’s position.
Although Google say it’s against their webmaster guidelines to buy links intended to manipulate pagerank, to get involved in excessive reciprocal linking or buying links that plainly pass pagerank, there are few cases of Google penalising a company for buying links direct from other webmasters. This is the safest method of buying links, manually and direct. Even if reported to Google, they’re unlikely to get involved since it’s hard to determine if you’re buying links for SEO purposes or for regular click-through advertising.
There are, however, daily cases of sites being penalised for buying into link networks and other automated link schemes – These are the kinds of link buying schemes you want to avoid. If your SEO company offers to place links on a network of sites operated by them, you should refuse the offer immediately! Likewise, If your SEO company tells you they have webmasters signed up, running their ‘systems’ link code, be cautious. Most likely the placement will be terribly unnatural (footers, side bars etc) and will likely result in a lot of links with the same text around them. These kind of link schemes are easily picked up by Google (automatically) and will result in a penalty within 2-3 months if not sooner.
Different types of link buying
Firstly, link buying is all about the text links. A banner image isn’t going to do anything to get you up in the search engine result pages (serps). Sure you can buy banners with the title text of your desired keywords but they’ll never provide anywhere near the same boost in the serps as a nice basic text link.
Below we’ll explore some of the most common paid link schemes out there today.
Low grade - Blog commenting, forum posting, guestbook comments, social media etc.
These links won’t give you much of a boost in the serps. But they’re free if you do it yourself and pretty cheap if you get someone else to do it. While they won’t give you much of a boost, they will do a great job of fixing that crazily high ratio of money keywords links you’ve bought. Google’s systems are smart, they’ll realise that when 950 of those 1000 links coming into your site all have the anchor text ‘pet insurance’, ‘buy pet insurance’ and ‘online pet insurance’, something isn’t right. So you mix in a few blog comments, social media pages and such like to fix your ratio and avoid automatic detection and potential penalties.
Medium grade - Automated networks
Open commercial link networks such as text-link-ads, reviewme, blogsvertise and TNX. These link schemes are open to all link buyers and sellers. Webmasters wanting to sell links will sign up and have their website assessed by the operators of the link network. If approved, they’ll be given a piece of code to place on their website (usually in a side bar or footer) which will automatically show text links for anyone willing to pay. As a buyer, you’ll usually have a choice over the websites your link is placed on or at a minimum, the theme of the site. These kind of networks are nearly always discovered and penalised. Due to their open nature, it’s never a question of ‘will this network get penalised?’ but rather ‘when will this network get penalised?’. If you’ve got a throw-away site and looking for a quick boost for a month or two before you get booted out of the serps then this method is fine. If you’re looking for long term results and working on an important site then stay clear of these kind of networks.
Medium to High grade - SEO company link networks
Most major SEO companies have their own private link network. Usually they’ll set up multiple blogs and standard websites which interlink to boost each others PR and incoming link count. Along with the interlinking, they’ll buy some high PR links and get junior SEO specialists to perform low grade link link development like those discussed above.The sites in these networks can be of a reasonable quality, with professional content writers adding content regularly. Before letting your SEO company add you into their network, ask them to let you review a few of the sites in the network. Look at the following things:
- How many text links have already been placed on the sites? If there’s a lot, especially if they represent widely different industries then be cautious.
- How many sites are in the network, are they all interlinked? Check their backlinks and see if there’s any obvious connection between the sites. If you can spot one, so can a Google bot.
- Are the sites hosted on different IP addresses (especially different C-classes)? If not, steer clear.
- Will your link be placed contextually (e.g within a paragraph) or placed in a sidebar, footer or separate ad box. For the sake of looking natural, you’ll want a contextual placement.
- Check the rankings of other clients they’ve placed on those sites. Are they doing okay? Are there any reports of their site being penalised in the recent past?
Private automated networks
These networks are similar to the ones ran by text-link-ads or blogvertise. Except rather than webmasters signing up to sell links, your SEO company would have approached different webmasters directly and offered them a monthly fee in return for running their link network code on their websites. This kind of network is preferred to one ran by your SEO company since the sites running your text links will generally not have any connection to each other, will be spread over a wide range of IP classes and have a larger spread of incoming links. There are however two downsides of this type of network. Firstly, highlighted perfectly by the case of Direct Traffic Media(DTM), if the main system serving the adverts encounters an error, such as a PHP code error, the same error shows up on any site running their network code. This makes it very easy for people to quickly scrape a full list of sites running the DTM network. The second problem is that due to the automated nature of this type of link network, you’ll most likely end up with a poorly placed link. Instead of having a contextual link blended into the content, you’ll get a side bar, ad box or footer link.
High grade - Although this is the most time consuming method, it’s the safest and will produce the best links… The method? Manually contacting webmasters who operate websites with a theme similar to your own. For example, if you’re selling pet insurance, there are thousands of blog and site owners out there you can buy links from. Few SEO companies have the resources and skills required to carry out this kind of link development and many companies want to take the short cut with automated link networks. It’s risk and patience vs. reward.