Buy your way to the Top?
If you’re an SEO, you already know the importance of building relevant backlinks. For the layman who may have heard terms like backlink and pagerank being thrown around, but wasn’t quite sure what they meant:
-Backlinks are the number of web pages that contain a link to your website (inbound links).
-PageRank is Google’s methodology for establishing the importance of a given web page. Google uses this “score” to determine a page’s position on their search query results.
Before Google, when someone wanted to optimize their webpage for search engines, it was all about meta tags and stuffing their site with keywords. With Google’s dominance the past few years, optimizing for search engines almost seems to be synonymous with optimizing for Google these days. Other search engines jumping on the bandwagon, of considering relevant backlinks in their search algorithms, include AllTheWeb, Altavista, Hotbot, and MSN.
So why are backlinks so important? Well, search engine “spiders” that crawl the Internet for websites to index do so by following links between sites. The more backlinks that you have from sites indexed by a particular search engine, the respective spiders will end up at your site that many more times. Additionally, backlinks are a sign of credibility. If other people are linking to you, in theory, it’s because they feel it’s a quality site. Not just another webpage thrown up overnight to sell something.
Be careful, however, as it is now becoming more about the quality of the backlinks as opposed to the quantity. Google’s algorithm actually takes into consideration the “quality” (aka- PageRank) and relevancy of the sites linking to you. Taking shortcuts and spamming your url all over the web will get you penalized by the search engines.
Here is Google’s take: "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
The demand for quality backlinks is high. Niche companies specializing in the facilitation of link swapping or text link ad sales seem to be cropping up everyday. I even see auctions for backlink placements selling on ebay! At this most recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, I can remember at least one company (http://www.text-link-ads.com/) exhibiting.
So won’t search engines consider it cheating to buy backlinks? Not necessarily, although search engines sometimes advise against this practice, it will not penalize your site’s ranking unless you blatantly try to cheat the system. “Cheating” the system can include buying backlinks in bulk (Google will know if your site has a big jump in the number backlinks) and as I mentioned before, spamming your link across the web. Being linked from a site with poor SEO or spamming techniques may penalize you. Get linked from reputable sites, with a good PageRank, and relevant content and you will be ok.
Keep in mind, however, that you must maintain your backlinks. Paying to get your link up on a site for a couple of months may give you a short term boost in PageRank, but it will not last. Diversify your strategy with a more natural approach to getting backlinks as well. Create quality content and the backlinks will come to you. J
For more information on buying backlinks, check out this blog post: http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2005/08/link_buying_bas.html
Here are some places you can buy or trade backlinks (with no particular endorsements from me):
http://www.text-link-ads.com/
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
http://www.paidtextlinks.com
http://www.htpcompany.com
There’s a bunch more, just search for it…
