Buying Links to Increase Your PR:
An Obsolete Link Enhancement Approach! Unless...
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| Article by Mathias Levarek Consultant for MSEO.com |
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I will start this article by explaining in a nutshell the concept of buying links for those who are not familiar with such methodology. Basically, companies such as Text Link Ads have been selling one-way-links from websites featuring pages with a high PR. In other terms, “link brokers” syndicate a whole network of websites willing to accept links pointing to your site. The purpose of such links is not to generate traffic, but rather to “simulate artificially” a strong link popularity factor by having links pointing to your site from web pages featuring a high PR.
The higher the PR, the more expensive for link space. Furthermore, these link brokering services specialize in not only giving you the possibility to pay for a link coming from a quality page, but also you can target the industry of the website from where such links will be posted.
In other words, if you were offering tour services in Hawaii, you could buy links from websites related to tourism, Hawaii tourism, etc. In fact, Google has been programmed to reward websites for quality links and not for the amount of links. The quality of the site linking to you is crucial in terms of ranking benefits. The link quality is enhanced by linking to websites that are “keyword family” related.
Back to my aforementioned example: If your website promotes tours in Hawaii, your site would not capitalize from being linked to a popular forum discussing hardware and home repair!
Before advising you against buying links, allow me to state that I am not herewith bashing agencies brokering links, nor am I pointing fingers at those websites making a buck from selling link space. In fact, that whole industry started because of Google’s link popularity ranking algorithm. I do believe that the essence behind such algorithm was brilliant. However, not every site has the profile for one-way-link enhancement. Due to the nature of some sites, building genuine links is almost impossible without being “innovative”. Google’s determination for rewarding a quality link popularity profile has led link brokering agencies to become what they are. In order to please Google’s ranking algorithms, a whole industry was born. Website publishers saw an opportunity (aside from Google AdWords) to generate income from their sites, while link-brokering agencies packaged the service based on the popularity of pages accepting advertisements. I just switched the terminology for “advertisement” since in today’s context, link brokers tend to refer to “link marketing”...I guess it makes them sound a little less “spammy”.
When “link-buying” became an industry standard, or more exactly, when “link-buying” campaigns became part of almost every SEO strategy, we advised our clients against such marketing approach. In the first place, the ethical character of this link marketing strategy is questionable from an organic ranking perspective. In fact, if Google rewards a website for the quality of the links, buying erroneous links with websites that would never refer to you unless they sold space is basically a way to say, “If Google wants links, I’ll give them links!!”
It defeats the original premise behind the link popularity concept. In fact, if numerous online users are speaking about your site on specialized blogs & forums, if keyword-enriched genuine articles are being published about your site, if regular press releases are being published professionally in regards to your site, if a lot of social networks refer to your site...then Google considers that your site is “alive” within such-and-such segment of the internet. The link popularity factor was a healthy concept to gauge the live and ongoing presence of a website. Brokering links just to improve PR is a way to dilute the effectiveness and the ranking fairness which constitutes the basis behind the architecture of the link popularity ranking algorithm.
Who is to blame? From my perspective, no one. It’s easy from this end of the internet to criticize Google technology ... Google.com is still the father of all decent search algorithms and has over the years circumvented successfully the challenge of its overwhelming database growth. The fact that it gave birth to a whole “link brokering” industry is only normal.
Anyway, as you might know, link enhancement services through “link-buying campaigns” has become a controversial issue and, as far as I am concerned, a very risky SEO gamble. Google started cracking down on link-brokering agencies by dropping either the PR of the syndicated websites offering link space for sale or simply by dropping their rankings. A company like Text Link Ads, which has been and still is the leader in the industry for years, recently lost their PR, and after recovering the PR, they lost all rankings ... Just Google “text link ads” and you will see that, even with the 3 words that make up their URL (text-link-ads.com), they are nowhere to be found. Once again, I am not here to point fingers, but rather would like to take this opportunity to advise you against being part of a link-building campaign based on “buying links”.
As I wrote earlier, not only are link brokering agencies being kicked by Google, but new algorithms are being released to penalize websites selling link space ... Come on ... The link popularity algorithms are the core of Google technology. Fair enough, it gave birth to a new link-brokering industry, but from Google’s perspective, link-buying is a bogus SEO strategy, faking the popularity of a site.
In most cases, buying links is simply trying to outsmart Google for better rankings. I personally advise every website publisher to work on the genuine character of their SEO approach rather than going for a “quick SEO fix”.
The best links are those that you will earn through business dealings, partnerships, etc. I am not herewith suggesting that you should not buy links. I am just advising you against implementing action blindly through networks that have been used extensively by numerous advertisers and which might have been “blacklisted”. I would recommend that you identify the sites with which you would like to link, always establishing an ongoing relationship with companies exchanging links with your site and, yes, in some cases, buying links can be acceptable as long as negotiated on an individual basis. Massive links (even from high PR pages) might raise “SEO red flags”, and this is why, to recap, I suggest great caution when considering the implementation of a link-building campaign based on a link-buying strategy.
Mathias Levarek, Ph.D.
SEO Consultant for http://www.mseo.com
1250 Connecticut Ave NW Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036 USA
Tel: +1 (202) 787-3989 • Fax +1 (202) 318-2453 • E-mail