Great article about paid links

[Giorgio]

Came across a good article, a must read for all of us.

Source

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb!
2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it.
5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too!
7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
8. Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
10. I guess I should round this out to ten. :-) Don’t worry about buying PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

[Tea Flow]

Great find sir!

[Giorgio]

I especially like point 10. I really think PR is overly prices when it comes to links. When asking for links I received offers for really spammy like pages - but of course with PR, IMO really not worth bothering with. Sometimes I see people offering links on pages with tons of outgoing links.

[pipeline]

The tips are good and all but the problem is even if you find a site where nobody is buying links from, it's only time when your competitors will come in and buy from the same page thus defeating the purpose of not buying on a spammy link selling site.

That's why if you do find a site that provides traffic on a link basis, it's good to have them redirect your link. You lose out on the seo purpose but don't have f'ers trying to outbid you by looking at your linking scheme. Most of the time if you deal with loyal people they won't listen to incoming people anyways.

[kingcobra]

Nobody on here is interested in buying any links of course I'm too cheap to pay for links anyway when I can just trade for them and I'm sure no one on here does this. Still though for theoretical purposes I'll comment on some of these

1. I don't have a problem trading links with any topic, but only an idiot would pay for a link to an unrelated page. And when I say related I really mean related. Casino and poker for instance aren't directly related at all, at least in terms of the way SE's work which are with keywords and meta tags.

2. I wouldn't worry about the 5 per page thing. I'd worry about other things such as how obvious the paid thing is, as mentioned in other points. Obviously the fewer the better from an SEO standpoint, but that's about it.

3. No one wants to be labelled as paid links and that's kind of like a hooker hustling in front of the police station.

4. This one's interesting. There's no reason at all to believe this is true and there's a lot of sites which have non-sold link placements here. This seems more like paranoia here to me.

5. Varying your anchor text is a good idea but it's got nothing to do with paid or not paid links. In the grand scheme of things you won't be buying enough links for this to matter at all, but if you can, it's a good idea, but again from an SEO standpoint only.

6. If the place looks sketchy in any way, and this is only one example, then staying away would seem to be wise

7. That's a great thing to have but it isn't really necessary. If you're this fussy you're either going to be pretty lonely or buy from places you shouldn't. Primarily you're after the link juice and having the page some kind of authority on your KW's is a big bonus but must be seen that way.

8. You can point them wherever you want but if I was to buy a link I'd want my money's worth. SEO wise I'll argue that the home page is where it belongs and we can debate that another time but if your reason is that you're trying to hide things that's a mistake.

9. Contextual links are great but this isn't always an option. I wouldn't limit myself to this and it's just one consideration here although a fairly important one.

10. I couldn't disagree more with this. PR is what you're buying for God's sake I'm not even sure there is such a thing as a no PR link for sale You can get all you can eat for free here anyway. If the PR goes up by the way the price does too so there's no sense thinking you'll benefit that way. These things are priced by toolbar PR period and it's not without good reason. This isn't a bad tip generally but not for link buying.

[thedoubles]

Awesome read, thank you!

[FullHouseTravel]

Exelent post all. I look forward to reading more.