Link buying. Some webmasters think it’s unethical to sell or buy links while others think of it as a natural way of increasing backlinks and earning money. I’m not going to use this post to advertise all those link selling companies like Text Link Ads or Linkworth because I think that it is quite costly to purchase links there. Last time I checked the companies earn, what was it, 50% of the price per month, is that correct ?

There are other, better, ways to purchase links and one of my favorite ways is to buy them in webmaster forums. Digitalpoint, Namepros or Sitepoint are just a few of the forums where you can buy links. If you take Digitalpoint for example you notice that they have about 5-10 pages of new posts per day in their link selling category.

There are basically two options that are worth considering when buying links. You can buy Blogposts or Blogroll Links. Blogposts have the advantage that either you or the seller are writing an article that is keyword related. Normally between one and three links are placed in such articles with anchor tags containing the targeted keywords. Blogroll links on the other hand are simply sitewide links that usually cost a bit more to place.

Prices start by roughly $5 per site depending on the type of website. Pagerank, Alexarank and other factors that are given by the webmaster selling the link influence the price. The usual prices are between $5-20 for a blogpost, sitewide links usually cost more depending on the time the link is placed. It is possible to grab some good permanent ones for $20-$50.

There are however several factors to consider before buying links and I would like to address them right now:

Pagerank is not everything

Some users purchase expired domains with Pagerank, upload a blog design, sell links and blogroll posts for a few months and even manage to sell the blog for a good price afterwards. The link buyers however will be rather unlucky with those links because the domain will normally be dropped by Google after a while which means that they bought a link on a Pr0 website with virtually no backlinks.

• I always check the archive of the blog to see how long it has been around. If I only see posts from one month or two I do not purchase a link there.
• I also check the Compete and Alexa ranking. If there is none I do not purchase links.
• You could also check the Wayback Machine or similar services to see how the domain looked like a while ago. That is only working if it is indexed.
• Another nice tool is the Check Fake Pagerank tool. It does display some useful information like domain age and if the Pagerank is real or fake. It also links directly to the Wayback Machine.

Blog Networks produce duplicate content:

You see a lot of threads from blog network owners lately. Blog networks consist of 50-xxx domain names with blogs that will post an article for a small amount of money. Pagerank differs of course and it happens from time to time that Google finds out and reduces the Pagerank of a lot of websites that are in the blog network.

The main problem however is that only one article is posted on all websites. This means duplicate content which in turn means that this method of obtaining backlinks is not effective. The blogs in the network are normally “general” blogs with categories that resemble a directory which means that the blog itself is not considered to be in the same niche as your website is.

My advice would be to stay away from blog networks unless you can publish unique articles on each website of their network. This is normally not proposed by the network owners because it would mean a lot of work for them.

Link Building Offers

Link Building offers are another way to obtain backlinks for your website. They do have some advantages, namely that you do not have to work on the link building but let someone else do it. The major problem with most services that are offered on those forums is that the links are usually placed on websites that many would consider link farms already which is something that search engines do not like at all.

Even if it is cheap to place links, say a few Dollars per link I would advice you to not do that unless the provider can prove that the links will be placed on legit websites that are not considered link farms.

Directory Submissions:

This is actually one of the services that I use a lot. You can get manual submissions to hundreds of directories for $10-20 which is a great time saver. Good service providers accept multiple titles, descriptions and keywords and send you a report at the end detailing exactly what they did and where they submitted your website to.

My advice is to create a email address just for this purpose. Many directories require a validation of the listing which is done by clicking on a link in an email that they send to your account.

Article Submissions:

I actually never used those in my whole life. If you find them useful you will find some great opportunities here to send them to a massive amount of article directories for a small amount of money.