Online Money Dot.com

Well, today (again) I got a PageRank downgrade on a couple of sites they were selling links using Text Link Ads. This was the second time in about one week. I guess it is a good time to lose Text Link Ads and do a post covering how to get better results from buying and selling links.

To put it very simply, there are two ways to get visitors to your site from a search engine. One is through SEO, and the other is using PPC (buying keywords). Google wants this last one The ideal situation would be with SEO and without having to spend money to accomplish it, especially since natural search results get more clicks than those labeled sponsored links.

If you can´t get to the top of the search results in a “natural” fashion you can try doing it using paid links. Links, and their anchor text, paid or not, are still one of the best ways to get to the top of the search engines, or Google wouldn´t be waging this war against them. There will even be instances when getting to the top spots on the search engines with paid links will yield better results and come out cheaper than with PPC. Not only do web surfers trust natural search results more than the paid ones, but you should also keep in mind that a PPC campaign is only valid for a particular search engine (Yahoo, Google or MSN), while good SEO will get you to the top in all of them.

So lets list the top points to keep in mind for better link buying results as well as to stay under the Google radar.

1. Buying links on individual pages or posts gets better SEO results and are a lot harder to spot. It´s a lot easier for Google to spot paid links on the sidebar, and at the same time they come out more expensive than the links on individual pages.
2. You should buy your links gradually over a period of time. How hard do you think it is for Google to spot a paid link if you put up 100 of them in a few hours?
3. Don´t buy links only in high PageRank sites, make sure you even out your link buying with lower PR sites, PR0, PR1, PR2, and so on.
4. Avoid buying links in sites that already have a lot of links, especially to “bad neighborhoods“. At the same time you should also avoid selling too many links on one page.
5. You should buy links to your inner pages and not only to your home page. This is the concept of “deep linking” I talked about.
6. Buy links from sites that are related to yours. It wouldn´t make much sense if a linked to a medical supply site on this blog.
7. Make sure you play around with your anchor text and don´t use the same one all the time.

Although these are links buying tips, they also apply to anyone that is selling links and wants to go unnoticed in order to avoid a Google penalty. Because in the end, why would you want a high PageRank if you can not make money off if it?