Links ahoy

by Rick Biederer

Before you purchase or sell text links, there are a few factors to consider...

As a business owner with a Web site, you or your webmaster may be contacted by various companies or individuals wanting to engage in either buying advertising on your Web site, or selling your advertising on their Web site through text links. Text links can be a great way to increase your site’s traffic, but before you go ahead and purchase or sell links, there are a few factors to be considered.

First, let’s examine the positive effects of buying links. If you purchase the right links, you can drive a lot of highly-relevant traffic to your sites. The more relevant the traffic, the higher the conversion rate of visitor to customer will be. For example, if you own an online office supply Web site, it might be helpful to include a link from a local school’s online class requirement list. This will drive visitors to your site that need your product and potentially increase the conversion rate of visitors to buyers. The relevance of linking and linked to sites is a key element in converting quality visitors to customers and is also a key element for better search rankings.

A side effect of buying links on sites is pages that receive these links can be viewed as higher quality and more relevant to the search engines which can boost your organic search listing. I use the term side effect because buying links with the intention of manipulating the search engine results can get you in some trouble as described later in this article. Many companies and individual webmasters will buy links solely for this purpose. In the past, this has worked well to increase a Web site’s natural listing in specific keywords’ search results. In the eyes of the search engines, buying links is fine as long as certain precautions are taken to insulate the search results from the effects.

Buying links can be a very cost effective way of bringing in potential customers. Links on sites that are of the same or similar topic as your site will attract visitors that are already interested in the products you are selling. Of course, this will only increase the chance that the visitor will make a purchase from your site – it will not guarantee a purchase. A well-written article on a popular site with a lot of Web traffic could be a prime spot to buy such links. If the article already appears in the search engines for search terms you are targeting, and the owner of the site will accept a small fee for turning some of the text on the article to a link to one of your product pages, your site could receive an ongoing benefit for that one-time payment. To put it in perspective, let’s say you receive 100 visitors per month from an article link you paid $20 for, and an average of five percent of visitors convert to paying customers. That means you will have gained 60 sales per year for a $20 advertising fee. Now, if you are selling pencils at $1 a piece, you’ve just made a bad deal. However, if you are selling plasma TV’s, you’ve probably just made an incredible return on investment.

If your business is just starting up, buying links can prove to be beneficial in boosting your Web site’s visibility and traffic without you having to endure a time consuming process of building your rankings in a search engine’s organic listings. Buying a few topicrelevant links when you are first beginning will help you build a Web audience for your site by letting them know it exists. By doing this, you leverage the existing Web site’s audience for your site and possibly gain some loyal viewers.

Another benefit of buying links is improved brand awareness and recognition. The more often a person sees your brand name on Web sites he or she recognizes as an authority on a given topic, the more likely that person will associate the topic with your brand name. Being seen with the top players in a given niche consistently helps build your brand’s reputation through association.

Buying links is not solely beneficial as there can be some devastating effects when link buying goes awry. One of the pitfalls of buying links is that if you purchase too many links too quickly, your site can be targeted by the search engines for attempting to manipulate the search results. This can be costly as your current rankings in the organic listings can be jeopardized. When this happens, one or more of the search engines could decide to remove relevant links to your site. The effect could be drastic to your organic listing. Additionally, the search engines may apply a penalty to your site causing it to appear very low in a keyword’s search results.

If a search engine finds you are selling links to other sites for ranking purposes, the search engine may remove any value passed to other sites. If you are buying links to improve your organic search listings, this could mean that the improved search engine listing could be taken away from your site at any time. If you are selling links on your site, the value of the links on your new site are now worthless in terms of improving other sites’ search rankings. This action may cause some search marketers to determine that your site has no value.

If you will be buying links for your Web site, one of the main factors you need to consider is the link’s relevancy. If you are running a site focused on pets and pet products, there should be no reason for you to pursue links on sites focused on women’s clothing or dental hygiene. Not only will links from these sites be disappointing to users, but they will, in all likelihood, not convert visitors to paying customers. If you plan to buy links for your site, it is better to focus on buying links on sites that relate to your site, that come from high traffic sites and from sites that are of a high quality. Massive amounts of off- topic links to your site may gain you short-term dominance in the search engine’s organic listings; however, if and when the search engines see the attempted manipulation, it may not be worth the long-term penalties you might pay.

As mentioned earlier, one negative aspect of buying links is that the search engines have a dim view of sites that sell and buy links for the purposes of manipulating the search results. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, has openly said that buying links is against Google’s Webmaster guidelines. The Google Webmaster guidelines are a set of rules that Google expects Web sites to follow in order to be listed in the search engine’s organic search results. Google even goes so far as to include a way to report other sites for selling and buying links by using their Google Webmaster Tools Web site. This doesn’t mean that buying links will automatically get you blacklisted with the search engines. The search engines do provide a way to allow webmasters to buy links in a safe way without manipulating the search results. The search engines do this through the use of the ‘nofollow’ attribute on links.

The ‘nofollow’ attribute is the search engine’s solution to the problem of the ability to buy links and receive the benefits of them without manipulating the search results. The use of the ‘nofollow’ attribute on a link lets the search engine robots know that the link was paid for and should not be counted for organic listing purposes. This allows a Web site to benefit from the traffic and conversion rates of bought links without risking the negative side effects in the organic search results.

If you are purchasing a link on another site, you need to know if you are buying the link itself or if you are paying for a review fee. For example, the Yahoo! directory has a $300 annual fee to list your site in their directory. This fee is charged for having the Yahoo! staff review your site for inclusion, and low-quality sites can be rejected. Other directories may also offer what appears to be a review fee, but in reality, they are trying to sell you a link on their site. One of the ways the search engines can tell if a ‘review fee’ is truly for a review is to look at the quality of the sites in the directory. Poor quality or off-topic sites included in a directory can be a sign that the links are bought instead of included for quality. Links bought from quality directories, such as the Yahoo! directory, are not perceived as bought links by the search engines. Due to the fact that there is a review process and a quality guideline is enforced, the search engines view these links as natural links. Natural links are simply links that, even if the search engines did not exist, would still be placed on the linking site.

Because the search engines are cautious about site owners’ actions that can affect their organic listings, you should closely evaluate the benefits and possible consequences of your link building actions with regard to your Web site. Gaining links from other sites can be very beneficial if done in a search engine-friendly way. Buy links from sites that have relevant content to the Web site or page that you will be linking to. Moderate the amount of links that you buy in a given time if you decide to buy links without using the ‘nofollow’ attribute. Finally, if you want to go the safest route, make sure the links you purchase use the ‘nofollow’ attribute. Following these three guidelines for purchasing links should help to increase both the number of visitors to your site and the chance that your Web site will be around for the long haul.