|
As more and more online marketers realize the importance of links to their Web success, services selling bogus and useless linking related services proliferate....
I get at least five inquiries a day from mostly off-shore firms offering to "Turbo Boost My Link-Building Efforts!"
Some sell packages of links. Give them $2,000 and they'll put a link to your site on 200 other sites or some such nonsense. I call it "nonsense" because the sole pupose of these "link sellers" is to convince you your search rankings are so dependant on links that if you don't do what they claim you will surely go out of business....
Nothing could be more wrong. The truth is that any link you can get either by buying bulk links or even buying one at a time could very easily come back to haunt you. The engines are on the lookout of these "rouge links."
Engines want to trust links, and for the most part paid links can't be trusted (don't get me started on the Yahoo directory link that costs you $299 a year. YES, it's a paid link. YES it can be trusted. But it's one of only a handful of exceptions to the "links can't be trusted" rule. Business.com is another.)
I'm not telling you you shouldn't buy links. Sure, buy them. But don't buy them for link popularity or search engine ranking purposes. Buy them for the audience they appear in front of. That's called advertising. A banner ad and a paid link are the same thing when you do it for the audience rather than for Google's algorithm.
And if you do buy links, buy them from a reputable company. There are a handful you can trust. Send me an email and I'll share them. If I listed them here I'd get hate mail for weeks from those off-shore guys.
Eric Ward
eric@ericward.com
http://www.ericward.com
|
Comments
Can you explain the $299 Yahoo link - I'm not sure whether you're saying that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Posted by: Dan McComb | 05.12.06
What Eric is referring to is the 299$/year paid link from the Yahoo directory.
According to Eric, its a GOOD link to have, and he supports his reasoning by saying that the link from Yahoo is surely a trust worthy link, and so the leverage you'll gain from that link will surely help.
Also, the exposure that link can get you is decent. So, if you discount the fact that it'did get you good PR,etc. it is still worthy as it is good exposure - which is well said (and well termed 'advertising') in Eric's later paras.
Also read Eric's article on The Case for Topically Irrelevant High Pagerank Links at http://www.ericward.com/articles/linkrelevancy.html - makes for a brilliant read.
Posted by: Saumil Patel | 05.16.06
My reference is to Yahoo's $299 fee for having your site reviewed (but not necessarily included) in Yahoo's directory. Technically speaking, this is a paid link, and Google plainly states that you should NOT buy links and that they can penalize sites that DO buy links. But Yahoo's paid link is an exception. This isn't stated anywhere on Google's site, but rather is one of those "little secrets" that nobody talks about. My professional advice on the matter is that yes, you should pay for a link from the Yahoo directory. --Eric
Posted by: Eric Ward | 05.17.06