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Link Buying/Selling Is Still Alive And Well

Posted by Paul B | April 15, 2008 .

Towards the end of last year Google unleashed a slap of monumental proportions on people who were seen to be selling links. The easiest targets to identify for this slap were websites selling through TLA (mainly because most also pushed TLA as an affiliate). The slap involved destroying the page ranks of these websites that were seen to be selling page rank, page rank is Google’s toy and they certainly don’t won’t anybody else playing with it! In many people’s opinions this crackdown would be the end of link selling as websites that previously openly supported Text Links Ads started to run for cover and beg the Google gods for their page rank back. It’s been several months now since that happened, here’s how I think things have gone.

Link Buying And Selling Is Still Alive
No doubt about it, for lazy SEO’s (buying) and webmasters (selling) TLA was the easiest way of buying and selling links, after the slap the scene has changed quite a bit. As a webmaster myself I find that I now get many more requests for people wanting to buy links directly. Not from Joe Average, it’s much more likely that I’ll be contacted by a representative of one of the larger SEO firms who represent big companies looking for an increased web presence. I talked to a few friends about this over the weekend and the general consensus is that the price for a link has increased post slap. For a link that you may have received $10 a month for from TLA (they take a 50% split) you may now see $30-$35. Somebody even reported selling a single 3 word link for $1500 a year. It was also generally agreed that link buyers are looking for longer term deals, they want 6/12/18 months, obviously it’s horses for courses but with the level of uncertainty in the global economy at the moment I’m sure plenty of us earning at the lower levels of online income would be glad of the stability. So it is still very much possible to make money selling links, but there are a few rules that you should stick to:-

1. Only EVER accept payment for a link to a website that is relevant to the page content on which the link is to be placed.
2. Consider your visitors, is the destination a quality website, would you visit it/consider linking to it if there was no money involved? (This is a valid point, of course we aren’t aware of all the websites in ours and related niches and the request for a link could be the first time you’ve ever heard of the site they are promoting)
3. Don’t even consider the thought that you are selling page rank, page rank means little to nothing (depending on who you believe), the slap itself proved how irrelevant page rank is because even as sites lost all their page rank their positions in the search results for the most part stayed the same.
4. Beware of people wanting you to add large mounts of text to your page to “fit” their link, if your current content isn’t relevant enough to their market then don’t accept the link.

What About Buying?
To get the most from buying links you’re going to have to do a little bit more work. For a start you’re going to need to contact the webmaster of the site you’re interested in having a link on personally. This involves finding their contact details (either through their website or domain registry). Be polite and don’t take offense if somebody doesn’t want to sell you a link (I suppose this is where TLA came into it’s own, at least you knew each site on there was actively looking to sell links). Also, make sure that your intended site is relevant to the website you are promoting, this should be a no brainer really. One final point is to consider trying to get a longer term deal for a better price. The good sized single lump of money may be enough to get you that link you desperately want, if not then don’t take offense. (Can you see where I’m going with this, having turned down a number of link requests I’m sort of sick of being called an asshole).

In Conclusion
I don’t think there is any doubt that the link market has changed quite a lot since Google got the slapping gloves on. The real winners are the webmasters who have spent time building high quality websites with lots of original content and good amounts of visitors. If your site is good enough you will get requests for links. If you want to move things along a bit consider contacting some of the larger link building companies and make them aware of your websites (Warning, crap websites will be found out). In terms of buying the winners are generally those bigger companies/website owners that can afford to pay for genuine interested visitors and not page rank.

The losers in all this are the webmasters who insist on pumping out spammy websites that quickly achieve a page rank of 3/4 and have spoofed Alexa rankings whilst having very little genuine traffic. Unfortunately TLA has plenty of these. Page rank and Alexa rankings are not important for those in the know when it comes to getting a link, what they really want is relevancy and ideally targeted visitors.

In a world wide web where links are getting harder and harder to come by if you’ve spent the time to build a high quality website that can deliver real live visitors then there is plenty of money to be made selling relevant links.

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7 Comments so far
  1. Allen.H ISRAEL Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12  April 15, 2008 12:12 pm

    “In a world wide web where links are getting harder and harder to come by if you’ve spent the time to build a high quality website that can deliver real live visiitors then there is plenty of money to be made selling relevant links.”

    I agree, it’s only after we’ve provided value to our visitors, we can start benefiting from that ourselves.

    Cheers,
    Allen.H

    Allen.H’s last blog post..JohnCow.com is Up For Sale

  2. SEO Optimization ITALY Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  April 17, 2008 9:49 am

    I never thought that Google would win the war, yeah they won the first battle but not the war. What Google did was get the big guys scared (yeah the PR6+ sites) and cleared out the field for the webmasters that have lower PR on their websites, they also increased the demand as many start hidding and increased the prices (now its even more profitable) as the risks to lose PageRank is higher.

    SEO Optimization’s last blog post..Kontera Annoys You?

  3. Beth UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  April 17, 2008 3:48 pm

    “2. Consider your visitors, is the destination a quality website, would you visit it/consider linking to it if there was no money involved?”

    Definitely a good question to ask yourself.

  4. Blog Tips UNITED STATES Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0  April 18, 2008 1:59 pm

    Something that may be happening right now, although it’s not confirmed, is that only links that existed on a page when it was published get full value. Links added after the fact, like this comment, get deeply discounted.

    That would kill the link buying industry, perhaps it already has.

    Technorati also doesn’t recognize links unless they were on the original post.

    And even more news - Google has wordpress semantics down cold and knows to look in the “content” section for content. Search results almost never return comment text these days.

  5. Around the Web and Back April 19 2008 UNITED STATES WordPress 2.3.3  April 19, 2008 2:57 pm

    [...] Link Buying/Selling Is Still Alive And Well [...]

  6. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  April 22, 2008 4:07 pm

    Even more reason to avoid any sort of CMS that leaves a foot print when it comes to making money online then. The Blogosphere is not the internet or anything like the best way of making money from it.

    Hand coded content sites work best IMO. (I don’t believe that links added to a URL after the initial crawl get discounted for one minute though).

  7. Webmasters Breathing PageRank UNITED STATES WordPress 2.3.3  May 1, 2008 4:55 pm

    [...] in the previous post on around the web and back, Paul had highlighted pretty well that the link sales business is not over yet and he is right. Not only that the link selling business didn’t stopped, but actually prices [...]