Is it possible to buy your way to the top of the search engines?
Webmasters everywhere fall into the trap of "the quick fix" - shortcuts to quickly getting high rankings in search engines. The problem is that there are only two shortcuts:
The "buy-in" strategy requires a lot of financial investment - effective link-building strategies earmark anywhere between 30 and 50 links to acquire per month (not much more, and definitely not less). This is because buying links invariably assumes the following:
As webmasters continually make the mistake of using Page Rank as the defining factor of determining link quality (it is important definitely, but not more than half of the whole process), getting 30 one-way links from PR 4 and PR 5 websites can cost you anywhere from $300 to $600. If you factor in the fact that this is a monthly cost, then you face the situation where you will continuously have to pay higher and higher amounts of money to get to the top.
Page Rank Definition: Google Page Rank is measured by the number of websites and the "importance" of
those websites that link to your website. In general, the more websites that link to your website, the higher your
Page Rank will be.
"Buying-in" to link popularity is expensive - it is traditional to adopt a buy-in policy for a handful of high ranking links (say 20 to 30 links spread between PR 5 and PR 7) for a while until the other avenues of link-building can bridge the gap and support your high search engine rankings.
The key to buying links is to find a quality link exchange website (you can find many just by browsing through the
Link Exchange Directories where you can view and contact other webmasters like yourself who are also looking to exchange links or sell advertising space on their websites. Just click on the "send a private message link" to send them a message about whatever you wish.
You'll find that you will get much better deals by simply seeking out a website looking to exchange links and then making them a deal to pay them for a one way link on their homepage.
If you're not concerned about price, you could also try 1 of the many link brokering websites like:
Why go for one of these link brokering websites, instead of going after webmasters individually?
Buying in to link popularity isn't for everyone. In fact, many of the websites that are located within these link brokering website like the 3 mentioned above, might not give you any benefit. It has been rumored that staff from Google, Yahoo, and MSN monitor the websites in these link brokering websites and know which sites are selling links.
Important: This is exactly why it may be better to simply contact websites within a Link Directory and
make your own deals. This makes it virtually impossible for the search engines to catch on to what you're doing.
Passive link-building in unpredictable - you can never quantify or monetize such an effort, and because of this exact problem most webmasters choose not to rely on passive link-building.
On the other hand, there are real-world examples of websites that have soared into popularity by mainly using
passive link-building - Boing Boing - an insanely popular blog focused on covering and highlighting quality web content (as well as giving a contemporary take on life) - is the perfect example of a website that has gained popularity through word-of-mouth and quality content, and not through active link-building techniques.
Passive link-building is all about natural link-building and as such does not involve any specific technique.
Natural link-building
Natural link-building is in fact the cornerstone of site-to-site linking as search engines understand and define it. As I've mentioned earlier, search engines justify using link popularity as a ranking tool on the argument that good quality sites will naturally attract links - people will link voluntarily to good quality websites without prompting or active link-building campaigns. In the same vein, poor-quality websites will not have mass appeal within their niche and thus will not get so many links.
Link popularity has been severely abused in the past few years, ever since Google initiated Page Rank and focused on link popularity. However, natural link-building is still a powerful phenomenon and if you browse through websites of a niche, it is quite likely that you will find links pointing to an authority website.
The lesson? Even in a world where people are trying to buy search engine rankings with link popularity, webmasters and online business owners continue to link to "useful" content on the Internet and continue to provide their visitors with "resources" (read links).
The only hurdle with natural link-building is that the emphasis on building the quality of your website, and not your link popularity (and letting that build by itself).
Important: The key is to balance the two methods. Build quality content on your website, which will cause
others to want to link to your website. Then also approach other websites within a link exchange to exchange links,
which will build your link popularity much quicker.
There are higher quality links, but if you have the opportunity to get any link, take it. No matter if it has an extremely high quality. Remember, any link is better than no link. The quality of links to a website is affected by several very specific factors, and I'll try to cover them in detail here. We are essentially concerned with:
This is the importance of the website the link is coming from. The quality of a link is based on several factors, including:
Quantity of links
Usually, when we are talking about the quantity of inbound links to a website we are talking about link popularity, but here the case is a bit different.
Here, when we talk about the quantity of links, we are talking about the following:
It is not enough to have high link popularity; the links must come from different websites as well. This is to dissuade black-hat techniques where webmasters would build up a network of high-ranking websites and then use these "important" websites to quickly build up the link popularity of a new website.
This is exactly why you should approach as many websites as possible for link exchanges...
Diversity of your back links will involve:
Basic link building techniques talk about putting your most important keywords into the anchor text of the links pointing to your website. However, to optimize your link popularity, you should aim to vary the anchor text a few times throughout your link building campaigns - most notably Google has started to pick up on this, and this is yet another measure to fight black hat techniques and encourage natural link-building.
What you must have noticed here is that most of these factors are inter-linked - the quality of individual inbound links is determined in turn by site quality, anchor text and link relevancy while the overall quality of your back links is determined by IP range diversity and specific link quantity issues.
The end result is that while increasing your link popularity remains relatively simple, improving your search engine rankings through a comprehensive linking strategy has become an increasingly complex task - the main reason for this is that search engines want to encourage webmasters to focus on content first, and promotion (letting the world know about your website) second, and not vice versa. The end goal of search engine technology is steady: provide relevant, quality content.