I recently spent $200+ testing out a text link ad broker who promised a big network of blogs, without footprints. This link broker sells on a monthly membership basis that ended up auto-renewing for a few months, partly because I was too busy to test immediately when I bought it. Lesson #1: Avoid buying on impulse.

This text link advertising network has a 3 step process.

1) Upload an article, and pick categories it fits under.
2) Add your text link in along with other innocent links.
3) Finally, the text link broker sends the article out to some blog they run.

When I finally got around to publishing some articles, I was in such a rush to see results already that I clean forgot step 2.

To keep itself discrete, this link broker doesn’t tell you what blogs the links are published on. So I couldn’t do a backlink lookup with a backlink research tool, nor could I get any reporting from this broker. (Except that the pieces were published, if memory serves.)

Forgetting to add in the links turned out to be a good thing, I saw later, because my article got posted on a wholly irrelevant blog. And not even an impressive one, that’s well maintained by humans etc. This was an obviously generic creation with no soul. “Take me to the Wizard for a new heart,” it whimpered tinnily.

(Lesson #2: If they sell text links based on automated distribution of articles, and you can’t see the broker’s inventory (to avoid Google smacking it all down), publish some articles with unique phrases in them.

Then Google it and see where it ended up.

Depending how relevant the resultant sites / pages are, you can decide whether to include your links in future articles.

[This is really just the grayhat parallel to the blackhat SEO's comment spam swing dance].)

Now, I know that my point about offtopic sites sounds contradictory to other advice I gave recently, about how it’s the page that matters. Isn’t it irrelevant what the site is about, and only the page relevance matters in determining the link’s value/relevance ?

It depends. It depends on some conditions. Imagine this as a spectrum of relevance.

- If the site is about nothing in particular, like a personal blog, news site or other generic publisher like About.com, then no, it doesn’t matter. The link counts if the page is topical.

- If the sites’ topics have 0 relation, but somehow the page manages to bridge that gap, it’s ok. SEO has no relation to dentistry, but it’s a clean link when I link to my dad’s dental related business from here, because he’s my dad – it’s normal and accepted that I should link to him. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this text link broker trial was for an affiliate site of mine, not my dad’s business.

- If your site topics overlap and the page is offtopic, it’s not grand (both in terms of traffic and link value), but it won’t hurt.

- If the sites’ topics overlap and the page is relevant, it’s better, simply because the traffic quality will be better. Traffic I get from my guest-posts at Wolf-Howl is pretty good, because our audiences are mostly interested in the same thing.

- If the sites are exactly on the same topic and the page is relevant, it’s money.

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) offtopic pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

- Also, (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

The latter type is what I encountered with the text link broker, and it’s why I cancelled the subscription. I dipped my pinky toe in, saw there was an oil slick in the water, and called the President got out.

Finally,

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) DO bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that DO count.

So yes, links from offtopic sites do count, including paid links from offtopic sites.

It just depends…

As they say, the devil is in the details.

Liked this post on text link brokers? Check the pros and cons of buying links, pre-published vs post-published text links, 101 tips on discretion in paid link purchases.

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Back when I used to do hotel SEO for the Hotel de Paris, one of the things that regularly came up in my competitive research was the importance of conference and convention hall facilities and networking in that field.

Why does having conference facilities help hotels with their SEO?

For the simple reason that convention organizers typically have a website. One trusted by search engines at that.

And therefore when those convention organizers mention the location of their event, they typically link to the hotel hosting their show.

Furthermore, they’re often encouraging attendees to book a room at the hotel.

Search engines ranks web pages in its search results based on the quality and quantity of links those pages have.

Guess what such a juicy endorsement tells Bing and Google?

“Rank this big, fancy hotel higher in the search results!”

Of course, there are solutions for smaller hotels to fight the rankings battle, too. Get my new posts by rss or email and find out more when I publish parts 2 and 3 of this series.

And for those more advanced SEOs among you, check out my advanced SEO book.

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Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever tips.

1) See how building links can support various departments. Makes me think of the interaction between links and sales (e.g. rank the lead gen whitepaper page) or links and PR (linkbait, publicity stunts, contests…).

2) In large organizations, you may need sign-off from multiple departments. That slows the campaign. So keep your activity within the scope of a single department to speed things up.

B – One thing I disagreed with in the next chapter was:

“You’ll have little to no ability to guide the keyword impact of these kinds of links (unless you’re buying the links or you’ve developed clever campaigns).”

Garrett and Ben at Ontolo are experienced enough to know that the name you give your content impacts how it’ll be linked to. My Internal Link Building plugin got loads of links that mostly use the name as anchor text.

That’s probably what was meant by clever campaigns, but given that that’s the case, why say you’ll have ‘little to no ability’…? Perhaps because some existing internal linkable assets can’t have their names changed for political reasons?

Ontolo and I are probably thinking the same thing but in different words, but I think the book could be clearer here.

Update: Garrett followed up with me and recognized this was just a little oversight. They certainly do recognize that names play an important part in determining anchor text.

C – Back to positive things:

- The point in chapter 2 about links having a brand impact is very true – assuming you’re doing quality content distribution. E.g. Guest posts, expert interviews etc – as Ontolo advocate. Directory submissions may boost rankings, but they don’t build your brand and do leave you vulnerable to the next algo shift.

- I find chapter 3′s idea of considering staff members as linkable assets a fresh idea. Likewise the notion that inventorying your linkable assets leads to figuring what link opportunities are available …

D – Their link opportunities section introduced me to something new… I won’t share what because at this point I’d get to spoiling the book.

The bottom line is this:

1) Beginner and intermediate SEOs, and especially inhouse SEOs, will get A LOT of value from the book. There’s a lofty breadth to the book that means you can quickly learn a lot of what is essential to quality link building campaigns.
2) Advanced SEOs and advanced link builders will get less from the book, because you know a fair amount of what’s there. But there are still a large number of actionable nuggets! If you’re at this level, the links you can build are worth $100 – $1000 a pop… so the value of a single of these ideas is ridiculous. The ROI is definitely positive.
3) Inhouse SEOs in particular will benefit, as a lot of the book is written with them in mind. There are considerations of working with different teams, getting help from the C-level execs etc.

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A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button . Also, have a look at my advanced SEO book, featuring neat principles and tactics.

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Find out in this great, interactive linkbait piece by Vertical Measures.

Those of you who are subscribers know that you can always download my link reporting/scoring spreadsheet. [And have been able to download it for almost 2 years!]

The spreadsheet features the various factors that go into scoring etc in detail. Full details in my original SEOmoz post.

So… what are you waiting for? Add my rss feed to your reader, you link building lovers!

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First, get familiar with the board. The dutch LinkBuilding.nl outfit have the link building board clearly laid out for your benefit.

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I was reading this post by Ann Smarty on SalesForce’s brilliant WP plugin, and it reminded of recent news from BuzzStream. BuzzStream are like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but for link prospects. And they just added Twitter functionality.

Any link builder worth his salt knows that the best links are about repeatability.
And relationships are a big part of making links repeatable.
Twitter builds relationships.
Ergo, Twitter makes repeatable links possible.

It used to be the case that you had to copy-paste or do manual data entry if you were building relationships for clients on Twitter and using BuzzStream as your link prospect manager.
Now you can just synchronize Twitter and BuzzStream and your efforts will be pulled in directly.

Win!

Longtime readers will recall that human resource managers should be measuring social media for your company. This also ties in to using Twitter as a community, which imho is more efficient than seeing it as a broadcast platform.

If you like this post on tools/social/link building, check out my advanced SEO book and get a free chapter.

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There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and other serious academics and quality sites with… Note that these things cost something like $20-$40 a page for a reason.

Speaking of content, I`ve been blogging little lately because I`m in exams and papers. That`s how I came to the above idea…

Separately, I`ve had some time to finally (I bought it over a year ago) read part of Partnering Profits by Brian Clark and someone else. I should have a review up next week.

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I recently read Rhys Wynne’s interpretation of John Mueller’s comment that it’s better to add content on your own site than to add it elsewhere. I disagree strongly that this is the right reading of John’s comment. There are numerous other readings of it:

- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site.
- Google is getting better at detecting quality content (and presumably differentiating it from junk).
- More in depth sites are favoured for now.

You can probably come up with your own. In any event, it’s clear that this is a whitehat tactic, and Google’s John Mueller was just pointing out that new sites need good content.

Bottom line: When a well-intentioned but perhaps sensational SEO bloggers says something, don’t take it for granted – check the source yourself. It turns out that the following [conveniently ignored] quotations were also part of the interview:

“Q 12. What’s your take on articles submission websites? I do a lot of article marketing & distribution for my clients. These are original articles written and distributed through sites like eZineArticles and iSnare. Obviously besides the exposure my clients get as experts, I am also looking at the SEO benefit of earning backlinks from these posts. How do you treat multiple copies of the same article spread over different sites?

“John Mueller: As mentioned in an earlier question, it generally makes much more sense to create great content for your own site, instead of giving it to a large number of other sites to publish.

“Personally, I would recommend not looking at it with regard to the links; think about how users will view the content and the people who created it. Having high-quality content on your own site will make it stand out much more than if that content is posted all over the web. If the content is unique and compelling, it will generally attract links naturally over time.”

Furthermore, there’s this goodie:

“Q 23. I know that inbound links will help my site’s ranking in Google search results but is that true for outbound links as well? I always link to quality websites from my articles where my visitors can read more about that topic but do these outbound links aid search rankings as well?

“Kaspar Szymanski: No, they don’t contribute directly towards your site’s rankings; however they add value for your readership and they contribute to the community, so feel free to continue this good practice. On the other hand, being selective and preferring quality sites to link to might help in how Google perceives your site.”

Linking out is a good practice for users, so long as the links go to quality sites. If their content is good enough for your site, doesn’t that make their site good enough for a link?

I note also that question 11, which Rhys cites to support his view, is in reference to new sites. This supports my reading about not sending visitors to thin sites:

“Q 11. I have launched a new blog and it obviously won’t rank in Google because none of the reputable blogs are currently linking to it. Therefore, I am actively writing guest posts on other blogs as that gives me a chance to get a link from them. Is Google fine with guest blogging and do links ‘earned’ from writing guest blogs matter?

“John Mueller: Making and promoting a new site takes time and effort. In general I would recommend putting that work into your own site, instead of creating content for other people’s sites.

“It’s much better to create great content for your blog and to let other sites refer visitors to your site on their own. Good luck!”

@Rhys: you’re a bright fellow who I’m sure is already having plenty of success and will see more in the future – no need to get a little extra attention at the risk of misleading a LOT of folks.

“Proving to be a huge traffic source actually. Sent me around 100 visitors already today.

Ironcially they don’t do pingbacks, but must’ve got about 50 or 60 scraped links from it O_o ” – [Rhys' comment on Problogger.com]

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To my friends, acquaintances and readers: I’ve got a sweet link opportunity for you that combines charity with trusted educational links.

Together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s student union (the “Aguda”) and the Office of Student Activities of the Rothberg International School, we’re organizing an anti-smoking programme. The idea is to give away -free – nicotine gum to students who want to quit, to help them kick the habit.

We’ll be setting up stalls where students can come ask for a pack of the gum, and invite them to give us their names/emails for follow up to see how they’re doing a little later. Permission marketing rather than interruption marketing, to avoid giving away gum to students not really determined to quit.

If you want to contribute to buying these gums for students, send me an email at gab@seor.. for details. I’m taking payments for this through Paypal, as well as contributing $1000 myself. We’ve also got people matching donations dollar for dollar, so that if you give $10, you’re helping us get $20 total.

For the links, any donation over $100 gets you a link on the aguda’s old, trusted site and another one on the program’s site. We may get a third link n Rothberg’s site, but it’s unclear for now.

I’m not sure whether we can give optimum anchor text, but I’ll do my best to arrange it. For the record, Matt Cutts approves of charity-donation links.

Again, to send money and get links, email gab at this domain (seor..).

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The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new. More juice for you!

The link-arms-race commentary given by sneaky [and helpful!] SEOs:

“Dear [webmaster],

My name is John Doe and I’m writing because I ran into a few bugs while browsing your site. Namely, there are broken links.

It’s a shame that your otherwise use[less/full] list of sites in your niche should be hampered by broken links and that they’d slow your visitors [Googlebot, and myself my broken link checker] down. So I thought I’d point out those broken links I found for your [annihilation/removal/hexic cleansing].

[Insert list of broken links, first or second amongst which are the competition's.]”

For bonus points:

 Use Virante’s clever PageRank Recovery tool – based off the SEOmoz API – to find all the pages/links on your competitors’ site that are problematic like this. Hat tip to Rand’s post on 30 SEO problems and tools to solve ‘em post.

This reminds me of similar tactics I came up with over 2 years ago in response to the common question, ”Should I buy links if my competitors buy links?”

If you liked this post on link building and such competitive sneakery, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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At SphinnCon 2010 yesterday in Jerusalem, I presented on guest post based link building. The main advantage, in addition to the high quality of links it builds relative to other sorts, is repeatability. View the preso to see what I mean.

If you’ve been wondering why I’m not posting regularly lately, it’s because I’ve moved to Jerusalem since mid-January and am currently studying at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. I’ve yet to get internet in my apartment (the first month I had internet via the yeshiva I was at prior to coming to Hebrew University), hence the slow posting frequency etc. Please stay subscribed as I hope to get internet soon and write at a regular pace again.

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This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins, a freelance Fresno website designer who blogs at Brandon-Hopkins.com

The most common way to buy links is to find a site that shows up in Google’s index, then contact the owner asking them to add your link in exchange for monetary compensation. What is often not considered is that published pages don’t change very often.

If you have a page that was published 6 months ago and the only change that page has ever see was adding an < a href... tag, isn't that a red flag?

I know it would be to me! Since this is content that is already online, we'll call this a post-published link purchase.

So a better, but often overlooked way to buy links is in pre-published content.

Buying links on pre-published pages takes a little extra effort because you have to contact the site owner/webmaster/blogger based on their past articles, but ask for a link in an upcoming article.

Since this content hasn't ever been seen by Google it won't raise a [why-is-this-otherwise-stable-content-suddenly-changing-] red flag when the post has a link to your website.

A few concerns with this method:

1. Posts with a single outgoing link are dangerous. Experienced link buyers know that you can quickly get in trouble if your link is the only outgoing link on a page.

Make sure the pre-published page has a few outgoing links in addition to yours.

2. Paid link outers. Just with any link purchase, you’ll encounter a few people who like to use Google’s feedback form to report your site.

You can easily get around this by not telling the site owner which site you own, and explain that you want a few links. Give them 3 links to include in the post. Your link, and two links to trusted authority sites that are not direct competition.

[Ed: You might also consider buying links "for" the competition and ask to have yours included as well to keep things under the radar.]

3. Time and labor. This is a labor intense method. You have to suggest topics for a post that your link will fit into. For many bloggers/webmasters, they don’t know what they’re going to post about so you might have to coach them on appropriate topics that would match the anchor text for the links you’re buying.

The only way around this is to outsource the labor (which adds a hard cost) or to by pass the individual blogger and go somewhere that accepts most links (like a regional web directory or niche directories).

4. Poor post quality. Knowing that they’re writing the post for the purpose of linking to you could lead the blogger to write a lazy post. A poorly written post won’t earn many links so you’ll have to rely on the strength of the main domain to provide some juice to your post. This completely depends on who’s writing the post.

A good way around this is to write the post yourself and offer it as free content. You might be able to get around spending money this way. [Editor's note: Brandon's implying in this context that you pay the site owner and provide the post. Obviously it's not a paid link if you just offer a guest article, like Brandon's doing here.]

Here’s to staying under the radar and on top of the SERPs!

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This is a guest post by Mark Ius, on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Ireland, which includes both a web design company, and an SEO company.

It’s well known that most SEOs hate link building with a passion. Why? Two reasons.

1. The best quality links in terms of SEO value are tedious to obtain and involve the traditional research-and-request model. Aka link begging.

2. Even if you do everything right, you might still not get a response for a multitude of reasons, going from stale contact information to derelict sites so old they’re grown over with ivy.

As a link builder, I can tell you that I feel the same way about it. But when push comes to shove, I remember these classic lines that Cicero wrote.

Section 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”, written by Cicero in 45 BC

“At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat.”
1914 translation by H. Rackham

“On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.”

Bottom line? Stop procrastinating, because you’ll be grateful tomorrow for the links you obtained today. Suck it up!

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I got the question recently from a friend at a big corporation, in the context of buying reviews. Of course, Google does not make the law (yet), but there are laws restricting misleading marketing.

In Canada, the main law in this field would be the Competition Act, whose sections 52 and 74 (or is that 54 and 72?) deal with misleading advertising.

The law was revised in March 2009 to, amongst other things, raise fines for criminal prosecutions under the Act. Which is awesome!

Fines were at $50,000 to $100,000 penalties for individuals, and $100,000 to $200,000 for companies.

Today they’re at $750,000 to $1M for individuals, and $15M to $20M for companies. A considerably greater dissuasive force, imho .

You can find my more eloquent and detailed post on this, in French, at Blogue Marketing Interactif. (I guest-write for the Montreal Marketing Association.)

p.s. What does this tell you about flogs?

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To visitors coming via my 101 Advanced Text Link Buying Tips article on Search Engine Journal, welcome. Here’s an overview of my link buying services. (To my regular readers, check out the article and link to it or link here if you like it . )

The main benefits of using my text link buying services are that I

• Reduce your risk,
• Get you the most value for money, and
• Maximize your ROI.

To buy text links effectively, I follow a few principles:

- Minimize risk by making paid links indistinguishable from unpaid links. This also maximizes effectiveness.
- Purchase links for rankings, but also for branding and community building. Brands and communities are valuable assets that drive traffic and revenue.
- If it can send traffic that converts, the link is worth buying. This is why demographic targeting is a valid approach to buying links.

My rates start at $1000 for every $1000 in paid link spend, which is based on the average amount of time involved in managing such a budget. For link purchases beyond $8,000/month, we can negotiate better rates. The rates are also negotiable for long-term commitments of 9 months+.

If you’d like discrete text link buying services, contact me.

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I’m working on an absolutely massive text link buying piece for SEJ. To keep your appetites whetted, here’s a little sneak preview.

“8) Buy a spot in a link roundup, whether it’s a list of resources, bloggers, blog posts etc. There are as many ways to do this as there are list posts!

9) Buy a text link in a ‘How Not To Do ABC’ post. These are popular in the web design community, such as the famous Web Pages That Suck. (Note: I’m not suggesting that site sells links; it’s just an example.)

10) Pay for inclusion in some widely syndicated ‘Recent Blog Posts’ widget. For example, SEO Chat distributes widgets you can put on your site featuring their most recent blog posts.

11) Buy family. Wouldn’t you like to be part of the Gawker media network? Legitimate sitewide links from major news properties…”

[...]

23) Pay bloggers you hire to add “guest author badges” to their sites, which badges link back to you.

24) Send webmasters holiday greetings. A parking provider I worked with did that for me once and it made them stand out in my mind. Small gestures can go a long way. Like $20 bills in ‘hope you’re having a nice January 17th’ holiday greetings .

25) Pay to be interviewed 1-on-1 by a blogger.

26) Pay your own bloggers to interview others, so that the “hey, I was interviewed at this site” link goes to you.

27) Work link requirements into standard contracts with suppliers.”

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

SMX West’s video SEO panel taught me that the number of embeds your video gets is important to having it rank better at Youtube, and potentially in Google’s universal search results. So why not speed things up by buying a few installs and links for your video?

If more embeds means better SEO, there seems to be an argument for buying installs, just as there is for buying links in normal SEO. An embed is when someone copy-pastes the html code from Youtube to put a video on their site.

Buying embeds or links for a Youtube page is all the more interesting since there’s less risk than buying links for your own site.

• It’s hard to see Youtube get penalized by Google, so your chances of wasting your money are less.
• Even if a Youtube page is penalized, you can always reupload the video with some slight modifications and try again.
• It’s not like you burned a website, with the associated expenses in time and money…

The problem is that it’s easier said than done.

Youtube Video Data Patterns

Quantitative Data: Embeds, Links…

There’s likely a pattern in the data in terms of the ratio of views to embeds and links. If a video has 100 views, it probably won’t also have 100 embeds.

Additionally, there’s probably a longtail curve in terms of what videos get the most embeds. A few videos with hundreds of thousands or millions of views get astronomical numbers of embeds.

The pattern also likely varies in accordance with the quality of the video or audio. For example, an amazing song will likely rack up more embeds per thousand views than an average track.

Qualitative Data: Video Star Ratings, Saves, Favorites, Adds-to-Playlist

There’s probably a large range of variance in the quality of videos. If that’s the case, the ratings look something like a bell curve: most ratings on most videos fall somewhere in the middle, and a few great / awful videos get extremely positive or negative ratings.

What The Video Data Means For Link And Embed Buyers

You’re likely to stand out from the pack if you buy links or embeds disproportionately to your video quality and popularity. This is especially true if you have very few impressions (eg under 1000).

One possible way around that is to buy traffic to send to your video. You can buy StumbleUpon traffic or you can even buy traffic from Youtube’s own sponsored video ads. See also Barry Schwartz’s screenshots.

But again, you may not have sufficiently good star-ratings, enough saves-to-favorites-and-playlists or other quality metrics to legitimize your embed buying and link buying.

One possible workaround is that the same way people sell Diggs, Stumbles etc., there’s likely an underground market for people who will manipulate Youtube quality metrics. Think of them as your own army of Google quality raters!

The bottom line is that there are some interesting opportunities here if you have a budget for experimental tactics.

You’ll probably need to do a fair amount of testing to get around Google’s data beasts. But if you can find a quiet spot under the ratings bell curve, and in a midrange area of the tail, you might pull in some nice video rankings.

If you liked this post, please add my RSS feed to your reader. That way, you can read more posts from me on link building, greyhat SEO and watch videos I create.

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• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

I’m working on some pretty detailed, informative pieces on link buying. One is a MASSIVE how-to. The other is a niche how-to for a specific type of content. If this type of link building is your thing, add my rss feed to your reader for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

What are the pros and cons of buying links? What risks and rewards should I consider in a cost-benefit analysis of a strategy of paying for backlinks?

Pros:

1) You typically control the anchor text and page that a link goes to.

2) Buying a link can engender less resistance than asking for a [free] link.

3) It can be faster than asking for a link.

4) Paying for a link can be easier than asking for a link.

5) You can control additional relevance factors, such as the surrounding text and the page title.

6) It can be a quick way to boost AdWords Quality Score. Michael Gray’s split-test proved this by testing the age and trust of links; landing pages with more links got better QS.

7) There’s less dealing with rejection, which is something many link builders (including yours truly) struggle with.

The corollary is that there’s more certainty in the results of a link buying campaign – pay $X, get #Y links.

9) You don’t need to invest in quality content.

Cons:

1) You don’t need to invest in quality content.

2) You’re spending money for something that might otherwise only cost you time.

3) Your link building is limited by your budget.

4) Your competitors are more likely to take your paid links out to the crowd.

5) Competitors can more easily kill the value of the links you’re buying.

6) There are a number of ways you can mess it up, and increase your chances of getting caught. You might:

• ‘Over-optimize’ anchor text and risk getting filtered or penalized, since you won’t fit the normal patterns in Google’s link data. Use N Grams to stay safe.
• Focus on the wrong metrics, like Pagerank. PageRank barely correlates with higher rankings.
• Only use one technique and again end up looking unnatural.
• Buy text links directly for the money site. Instead, buy links for intermediary sites that funnel the value onwards and absorb the risk.
• Not disguise your highest risk purchased links.
• Go through a network whose inventory is known to search engines.
• Overlook footprints that are associated with buying text links. Note: This is a risk with organic link building, too.

7) Google may penalize your site or those you’re buying from by reducing traffic or Toolbar PageRank.

It may devalue the clean links you’ve already built for a site, if the whole site gets penalized because of a few paid links.

9) It makes selling a site that much harder, according to my friend Jon Kelly of Sure Hits, who spoke on the subject at SMX Advanced 2009.

10) There are ethical issues with disclosure when buying links.

11) Paid links are easy to replicate. You’re not building a sustainable competitive advantage when you pay for links.

Conclusion: Choosing to buy text links can reduce the hassle of building link popularity and help you catch up to competitors. It won’t replace quality content, a viable business model, or a unique value proposition.

If you want to do it right, you need to follow that big principle of link buying: study link patterns, and do your best to minimize the risk involved.

If that’s not for you, then you can contact me to help you with your link buying, or approach one of the following pros that I recommend (and none of whom paid for the recommendation ).

Michael Gray’s Wolf-Howl SEO Consulting, a well known proponent of link buying
Brian Chappell, who has spent hundreds of thousands buying links
Wiep Knol, an all around link building pro whose articles I read
Debra Mastaler, another link building expert I read
Todd “Stuntdubl” Malicoat, who doesn’t advertise the service but is probably open to hear you out.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data