To Pay or Not to Pay – Five Tips to Identify a Valuable Paid Backlink

A couple of days back, I got an email from a friend of my colleague at work enquiring if I was interested in buying a link for from their site. The site in question is an old domain (about 9 years) and has a good PageRank on the homepage and even ranks well for some of the keywords in their area and has good consistent traffic. Moreover, it is a directory providing information on an area not particularly related to ours, although there are some similarities. The good people behind the site have put in some great effort in the recent days to redesign and to develop the site to make it more search friendly and appealing to the user. For a monthly payment, we will get a link back from a page which is two clicks away from the homepage and easily navigable for the user and it looks like we will be the first ones (and probably the only one) to get a link back from that page. Although the page has a PR0, I am aware of a previous page which had a good PR and it has been 301ed to redirect to this page. I am tempted to discuss our link with them and will do so in the next couple of days. However, the issue of buying a link, especially when Google has penalised link buyers and link sellers raises a thought.

Time and again Google has come down hard against paid linking which a majority of websites rely on to improve the quality of incoming links. Undoubtedly, organic links are more valuable to websites than paid links, but it is often difficult to get a quality organic link as Google discounts many of the proven tactics in sourcing such links. For example, reciprocal linking which used to be quite a huge hit among webmasters a few years ago is no longer a dependable strategy to build a quality backlink profile. The same applies to three way linking and many such techniques which were invented to circumvent Google’s crackdown. In fact, subsequent to the recent update, link exchange pages on many websites have been hit and they no longer have a good PageRank which used to be an indicator to the quality of links you could probably trade for.

Another way of sourcing one way links was through directory submissions. But the quality of links from directories has always been questionable as many of these directory sites link to spammy/low quality neighborhoods. Little wonder that Google penalised a good number of general directories due to low quality of filters for a website to be listed along with many other attributes including a bad backlink profile for the directory itself. However, there are a few recommended high quality directories which rank well with search engines. But the lists of these quality directories are few and the category pages where you can have your listing from don’t necessarily have a good PageRank. True, for quality directories, the PageRank of the home page funnels some power to the category pages, but the numbers of links on these pages mean you get a tiny benefit of such listings. Moreover, listing in such high quality directories are often paid (BOTW, About, Business etc) or the time frames for listing are extremely high (DMOZ).

Of course, there are many other ways to build links naturally by adding quality content to your site, blogging regularly, using articles as a link bait, press release, building cool tools related to your site, building applications and generating content for the Social Media, creating and distributing templates for blogs, directories etc. The number of opportunities the Web 2.0 (user generated web medium or social media as it is referred to) offers is infinite and deserves a post on its own (I will surely blog this in the coming weeks). But it definitely involves a certain level of creativity and persistence to generate high quality of links.

In many ways, the Search industry has evolved to adopt better ways to source that golden link which adds value to the website’s link profile. While building natural links is dominant strategy, acquiring quality paid links remains a focus for SEO Marketers. From link farms and paid directory listings to link brokers, every SEO marketer has explored one or all of these options to gather backlinks. However, are these paid links always valuable? How do you determine how much benefit a link adds to your search marketing efforts? Although in the beginning, I would rate anything with a good PageRank as a good backlink, over the last few weeks I have learnt to judge what page offers a better value for a website. Based on my experience, I have a defined five point criteria for link buying which am sure works for many industries.

1. The quality and authority of the domain.

• The age of the domain (Whois lookup) and the traffic it generates (Alexa, Compete or from the site administrators).
• The Authority for the domain among Search Engines. (I have always found Google’s Sitelinks to be useful in judging this)

2. The Quality of Backlinks to the Domain and the page

• Using link:www.domain.com and link:www.domain.com/backlinkpage on Yahoo Site Explorer and Google
• Although Google lists the links randomly with no particular order, Yahoo seems to show Quality/new links higher

3. Does the site and the page have information for users and is it related to your industry?

• Do users benefit from the content? If they are looking for something in particular will they seek information from the pages?

4. Are there any other links on the Page? If there are, what is the quality of these links?

• If there are far too many links on the page, it is unlikely that it will appeal to users and this is true in case of Search Engines too. Also, the quality of the outgoing links also matter to a great deal as too many spammy sites can turn off the users as well as Search Engines.

5. Will we benefit in terms of traffic generation from the page?

• If a link doesn’t direct traffic to a website, then it’s probably a low quality page similar to those thousands of directories developed mainly for SEO purposes. I personally feel that a quality link always has a potential to generate and direct traffic.

My personal opinion is that if the linking page and domain satisfies these qualities, then it is definitely worth a link back and merits a small payment to leverage benefits. Although Google discounts paid links, if a link qualifies the aforementioned criteria, it is sure to escape the Google scanner.

Please feel free to post comments.