Link buying – Link building a long story

Posted by Kay Schaefer in the SEO, section.

This article has been written by Kay Schaefer from KSOM for and published by iGaming Business Affiliate.

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. – Google Webmaster Central

Thanks to Google, links have influence on the rankings. But how to manage a link building strategy, what is allowed, what is good for my rankings and what is my competition doing?
All these questions are answered in thousand different ways. This article tries to give you a guideline to give you some knowledge and decide which way you want to go.

Google Webmaster Guidelines
These are the renown guidelines provided by Google that tell the good webmasters what they should do.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” – Google Webmaster Central

Reading this guideline we could take the conclusion that link building, advertising in a way, is permitted as we would do it even if search engines would not exist to attract users to go to our website.

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. – Google Webmaster Central

These guidelines only tells us that we should not participate in link schemes designed to increase our rankings. To understand this better we need to have a look at some examples of a link scheme that Google provides:

Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Links that pass PageRank are all links that are visible for search engines, that do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Due to this examples, moderate link exchanging seems to be the only link building tactic allowed and link buying and selling is strictly forbidden.

If all this is forbidden what strategies are possible following Google’s Guidelines and is it enough to compete?

It is obvious that you need links to rank for your keywords in the search engines, even Google says so officially in their guidelines, but how to build them. Let us assume that every link counts and that there are differences in the quality of the links. Furthermore let us assume that Google sees also the whole picture of the link structure of the website and can find patterns. The objective has to be getting links without showing an unnatural link mix.

Should common strategies and link building sources like link baits, web directories, link exchanging and article links be part of your link mix?

Link baits

I have seen very clever link bait tactics which can be considered following the guidelines, by using extremely good developed articles and contacting private persons all around the web telling them about the article. This is a very effective but also extensive tactic.
Especially in gambling, the topics are more difficult to find, but definitely not impossible. Gaining links this way seems to be seen 100% natural from Google.

Web directories

Being present in web directories (http://www.dmoz.org/, etc.) seems to make sense for users and search engines as well. Even though Google has taken action against the overuse of these web directories they should form part of any link mix. Find industry related directories and submit your website, make sure to avoid duplicate content, so any entry should be unique. Remember before the search engines there have been only web directories to guide the users through the web so it is a natural way to “advertise” in the web.

Forums

A long known and natural way to communicate and discuss in the internet are forums. Search for forums of your industry www.affiliateguarddog.com, www.casinoaffiliateprograms.com and www.gpwa.org are just some examples. Do not spam them, participate and embed your website, when it makes sense. Signature and direct links from posts are the most common way to “advertise” your website.

Link exchanges

Having friends and referring to them is not a bad thing, even Google states that only excessive link exchanging is not allowed. Usually I suggest to not use your main project for link exchanges as we do not know what is moderate and what is too much. When you do exchange links have a look at the quality of the websites you are getting the link from. Getting links from the same topics is better than a link from an automotive website. Getting a link from inside the content is usually better than out of a blogroll.

Articles

When someone writes an article about your website or about your industry and refers, links, to you out of the content of this article, this is the type of high quality link you want to have. To get these links you either have to be popular (link bait), be a friend (link exchange), be a customer (link buying) or be the owner (own website).
The stronger and cleaner the website is, the higher is the impact on your rankings. These links look usually very natural to search engines and even for quality rater from Google.

Link buying

All the different links sources mentioned can either be generated by yourself or bought using the offer of another company. The outsourcing of duties is a common business strategy. Why should this be punished by Google? The answer is obvious, ranking should not be influenced by the money you invest, but by the quality of the content you provide, as the search engines are for the users.

Despite this should link buying be part of your link building strategy? This is your decision to make just think of the following points:

• Google does punish obvious link buying.
• Link buying can help your rankings.
• You decide what to buy.
• It is difficult to see the exact impact of your bought links.
• What links does your competition have?
• Prices vary strongly.

My opinion
If you keep your backlink profile balanced and natural, link buying could be part of your link building strategy, as a form of outsourcing. At some point you might need more link sources than you might think of and that is when it can help you out. But be aware to buy good links, even if they seem more expensive, but they will work possibly longer than cheap ones which can even hurt your rankings as discussed before.

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