One of the (if not THE) most discussed topics in SEO is getting links, and there are literally hundreds of ways of getting ahold of them, from social bookmarking, blog commenting, link exchanges and so on – but the one thing that google and most other reputable professional search engine optimizers advise against is BUYING LINKS.
I take a totally different viewpoint on this – I feel that rational link buying is not only a good thing for your website, but its a totally necessary (for most sites) activity that every SEO should be involved with. I also believe firmly that most well know SEO’s that publicly say that its a bad practice, secretly actually do buy links.
Why would they advise you against something that should be done? Well, its just creating more competition, and ultimately driving up the value of links across the web.
You will notice as well that the wording I used was “rational link buying” – what does this mean? Well, its all about the type of website and link that you are seeking to buy. To help you out on that I have composed a list of Do’s and Dont’s:
DO:
- buy links from websites that are quality and on topic
- buy links from high pagerank websites, and low pagerank websites – not just one or the other
- buy links from sites with realistic numbers of pages indexed
- buy links on main pages on websites, NOT sitewide’s
- buy links that are in-content, and NOT blogroll links
DONT:
- buy links from sites that have nothing to do with your niche
- buy links from sites that are autogenerated index spam
- buy links from sites that already link to high spam industries, ie, porn, gambling, pills etc.
- buy links from sites that have unnatural link profiles themselves
- value the link purely on pagerank, take into account all factors, traffic, indexed pages etc.
So, feel free to buy links for your website, as long as you follow the lists above, and keep some common sense!
