Tips for buying links

Of course buying links is the work of the devil, and certainly not feature in a SEO strategy. However at certain times you may have a website that is very poor and offers little value. In these situations propositions to acquire links organically may be a bit of a headache, and in a moment of weakness you may find yourself buying links. Should you even find yourself in this situation, here are some tips to gain the most value and protect yourself from being penalised.

When buying links you must take many factors into consideration:

• Quality of domain name
  Usually the quality of the domain name is a great indicator for how spammy the site is, or if it is simply being made to sell links. Try and stick to domains that actually look decent, rather than mambo jambo.

• How many links have been bought already
  If a webmaster sells a lot of links on a web page, the link equity derived from outbound link is reduced. One can’t do much about links sold in the future, but it’s best to target pages that haven’t already sold many links. Also look at the quality of the other links that have been bought since it’s best to avoid bad neighbourhoods. 

• Placement of your link
  Higher up the page will derive greater link equity. If you can get the first link on the page then you’ll gain the largest amount of link equity you can.

• Has the site been penalised by Google?
  Google obviously does not like individuals buying links, so often you will find that pages selling them will be penalised. Having links on such pages can actually harm your rankings, so avoid like the plague. One indicator that a page has been filtered is that the PR is significantly lower than the SEOmoz rank.

• Is the PR Valid?
  Someone might be selling you a PR5 link but they may be faking the PR. It’s quite hard to spot someone when they do this to increase it fractionally, but occasionally you’ll come across people that will try and pass of a PR6 domain that only has a few back links. Most days I’ll come across this. I tend to trust SEOmoz rank rather than Google PR despite the fact SEOmoz rank is only a guess itself.

• Matching Anchor text
  It really increases the value of a link if a site has a similar anchor text distribution to the one you are targeting. For instance, a link on a coupon blog will be much more beneficial than a link about cats. Therefore when compiling lists of opportunities for links in the listing, I’ll state the general category I’m targeting to increase the possibility of an anchor text synergy.

• Banner Image vs Text Link
  Generally most link buying opportunities will be text based and cheaper but don’t overlook possibilities to buy banner space. It has many benefits. Firstly it is regarded as white hat SEO so you can do it without any guilt, banners placed at the top of a page are generally the first outbound link so you’ll benefit from a larger amount of link equity.  You also benefit from brand exposure.

• iTrader
  If you are buying links for a year or even longer then there is a great deal of trust involved. There are few indicators of how honest someone will be, but if you are buying from DigitalPoint (shock horror) then look at the iTrader and take it with a pinch of salt but if there is anything to suggest it might be dodgy, steer away.          

• Content
  Try and target sites that have unique quality content. Unfortunately these are rare in existence and most blogs or CMS on the marketplace selling links tend to be full of paid content promoting fake handbags/Ugg boots or content populated from Yahoo Answers. If the site has unique quality content then be prepared to pay more for a link; especially if its keyword density matches your target anchor text!

• IP Range
  You will find people selling links that you like doing business with but you have to give consideration to just how many links you buy off one person. If the link network is one on one host, then the websites will share the same IP and search engines will acknowledge this and devalue the value of the links.