Is renting links a good idea?

[Scottish Business Owner]

I've been having some discussions with an internet marketing company over the past few weeks regarding a linkbuilding campaign. I asked them to quantify the number of think they felt they could acheive in a twelve month period which they did but part of the proposal indicated the links were rented.

Is it just me or is this a bit of a nonsense? You aren't actually building anything here as as soon as you stop paying them I would assume the links would disappear? Is buying links a good idea and shousld it be part of your link building strategy? How do you find the sites that rent links?

 

[Power Lunch Club]

What is a link building campaign? And how does it work?

Gordon
PLC

 

[Gordon N]

Link building is a major element of Search Engine Optimisation. It is a means of increasing 'pagerank' but only if done correctly, and using effective and relevant sites.

Basically, if you manage to get a link on a site with a greater pagerank than the page on your site that it links to then some of their rank rubs off on you! There are certain points that should be noted about link building...

1] Don't add too many too quickly, search engines see it as spam!

2] Be selective in what sites you link from.

3] Where possible place a keyword rich 'deep' link to a page within your site rather than the homepage itself.

4] Keep track of what links you have placed where, and maintain them (if for example you alter your site, don't leave a dead link on the linking site!)

Over time I have gathered various hints and tips for link building, and I am in the middle of implementing my own campaign. Link renting does exist, but in my opinion unless the price is right, the site has a good pagerank and their content is relevant to your site - I am not a big fan.

There are some paid directory listing that would be worth a look if you have some cash burning a hole in your pocket - Yahoo! ($299/year with a PR8),Best of the Web ($200 with a PR7) and a more affordable Clush ($20/year and a PR7).

This is a service that I offer as part of my web marketing services, (what a perfect example of a deep link that didn't cost me the earth!)

Regards,

Gordon

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

Over time I have gathered various hints and tips for link building, and I am in the middle of implementing my own campaign. Link renting does exist, but in my opinion unless the price is right, the site has a good pagerank and their content is relevant to your site - I am not a big fan.

There are some paid directory listing that would be worth a look if you have some cash burning a hole in your pocket - Yahoo! ($299/year with a PR8),Best of the Web ($200 with a PR7) and a more affordable Clush ($20/year and a PR7).

Help me understand the above. If buying links is a bad idea then why is it a good idea to pay for entry into directories? Are they not the same thing? I would have thought a well anchored link from a relevant (whether it's rented or not) would outweigh a directory listing. I dont understand why these directories carry the weight they do due to them being human edited, there's a flaw in the system being the people who somehow manage to make a decison as to what goes in and what doesn't.

 

[Gordon N]

I dont understand why these directories carry the weight they do due to them being human edited, there's a flaw in the system being the people who somehow manage to make a decison as to what goes in and what doesn't.

My understanding is that they carry the extra weight partly due to the fact that they *are* human edited. This in Googles eyes means that the content is managed and relevant to the page topic (ie not an automated free for all anything goes type page). An added extra is that due to them being a manged resource there are less broken links on the page, which believe it or not can actually have an effect on not only the directory page but any site linked from it! Some paid sites (other than directories) also rank quite high as they are 'nearly' free of spam entries, if you are paying for a link you are only likely to do so on a page relevant to your own site/content matter - otherwise whats the point?

I must stress though these are only my opinions, and will vary widely amongst different designers and consultants. This is a subject with a secret book of rules that only the search engine big boys know!

Gordon

 

[ScottJ]

Buying links is like doing 90 on a motorway in your car to get to a very important meeting.

If you don't do it you see everyone else speeding past you to get there and make money and you may lose out and feel frustrated at others success.

If you do it, you can get there quicker and make money, however if you get caught by the Google police for speeding you will never make your meeting, never mind being a bit slow/late you'll regret it and saying everyone else does it is no excuse.

So as long as you have a snooper and are careful its fine but it can go horribly wrong.

 

[alanbold]

Too much emphasis is being put on renting or buying links in my opinion, yes links are important but content is king, especially new, relevant content. If people spend time adding new, relevant, good content then this will attract inward links, as will both online and offline marketing of your site/business.

 

[Brian McIntosh]

How easy is it to add new content though? In businesses that have a dedicated webmaster that should be quite easy but for the one man band, and I include myself in this, it's a lot more difficult because of the hundred other things that have got to be done during the day.

 

[TomB]

I suppose the way to look at it thought is that the website is your brochure for sales so you have to make time to add content.

My portofolio always suffers when I am busy but I need to update it as as i do new pieces of work i need to put them in to advertise how wonderful i am

But i agree with Alan, i don't like this whole buying and renting links thing. If people like your site they will link to it, stumbleapon it, put in in blog posts, link to it in forum signatures etc.

And why do they like it, because you have great content, and you have great content cause you make time to do it

if only it was that easy

 

[ScottJ]

It is simply not enough to have good content, it's business and you have to market yourself aggressively,

Looking at the top 10 searches for things like loans, furniture, credit, bingo - these sites do not spend all day building good content, they spend large amounts of money on marketing to specifically generate links/interest.

Build it and they will not come, Content is not king.........
(correct at time of going to press, subject to change )

 

[TomB]

and yet if you read seo guides and various sites and they stress that content is king and its all about good content and how if you have good content people will want to link to you etc

I think as well looking at the top ten sites though they are big companies that can afford flashy tv commercials, colour newspaper adverts and aggressive marketing campaigns also where the company name is a strong brand that you have probably heard of and that stands on its own as to what it does.

I don't think many of us could afford that. I wish I could but maybe some day . .

 

[ScottJ]

It's a different day today I think though, when you created sites with good content in 2000 to 2005 everyone linked to it, easily, without asking, it was deemed good for your site to link out and that was the spirit of things.

Over the last few years people don't link very easily even to good content, eveyone if more protective and wary of bad neighbours - how many emails do you get each day asking for backlinks? People link less unless financial reward is offered, people worry about linking to off-topic sites and even their own network of sites, of course Google has helped instigate this fear and created their own problems through it.

 

[Kevin]

I've been having some discussions with an internet marketing company over the past few weeks regarding a linkbuilding campaign. I asked them to quantify the number of think they felt they could acheive in a twelve month period which they did but part of the proposal indicated the links were rented.

Is it just me or is this a bit of a nonsense? You aren't actually building anything here as as soon as you stop paying them I would assume the links would disappear? Is buying links a good idea and shousld it be part of your link building strategy? How do you find the sites that rent links?

Under NO circumstances should you rent links or buy links if your looking for a link building campaign you should give me a call on 08701302537. We don

 

[andrewburnett]

Late in commenting on this too, but I just joined a couple of days ago and am going through posts that I think I can add to. That and the fact I'm jet lagged after staying up until 7am to catch a live broadcast from California on recent social media developments

Renting links is pretty much never a good idea for SEO, but it can be a decent source of referal traffic. Google, contrary to popular belief, does not state that links may not be bought or rented. It does however say that any such links should be clearly marked and be "nofollowed".

The great Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz (The SEO forum) himself admits to buying links for clients SEOmoz | The Art of Buying Links Under the Radar

I love ScottJ's analogy:

Buying links is like doing 90 on a motorway in your car to get to a very important meeting.

If you don't do it you see everyone else speeding past you to get there and make money and you may lose out and feel frustrated at others success.

If you do it, you can get there quicker and make money, however if you get caught by the Google police for speeding you will never make your meeting, never mind being a bit slow/late you'll regret it and saying everyone else does it is no excuse.

So as long as you have a snooper and are careful its fine but it can go horribly wrong.

This holds very very true, but perhaps in more ways than are outlined in the quote:
1. Who can honestly say they have never speeded?
2. We all know there are ways of minimising the risk of getting caught:
2.1 Not sitting at a constant 90, but fluctuating your speed and watching what the car behind you does in response
2.2 Slowing down if you spot a speed camera
2.3 Keep an eye on cars you overtake to spot telltale signs of them being unmarked police cars

Consider this scenario if you will: Someone asks you in the pub to put a link to their website on yours and gives you a bottle of 40 year old single cask malt whisky for your efforts. That is very clearly a bought link (if it was rented they'd need to give you a bottle every year/month) but there is absolutely no way on earth it can be algorythmically detected. Clever link buying / link renting is not advertised but it is a fallacy to think either that it doesn't happen or is always detectable.

"Hang on a minute Andrew, Google invite folk to clipe on sites they suspect of linkbuying or renting!" you cry, and you'd be right, but for the major flaw in the model:

Anyone could bury their competitors using fake claims of linkbuying/renting.

Disclaimer: Whatever you do do not ever buy or rent links from people advertising such services on the internet - you probably will get caught.

 

[Adventurelife]

No not a good idea to rent but building links is a good idea.

Building links to your site for other sites is of course a good idea as it will improve your ranking and drive traffic and if you have your conversions ratios sorted make you money and that i s always a good idea:

Building links has indeed got much more difficult over the last couple of years, but can be done. The big down side is it is hugely time intensive.

Going forward the time required to do it will probably remove the ability from small business owners doing it themselves so they will have to pay for it.

 

[andrewburnett]

Building links has indeed got much more difficult over the last couple of years, but can be done. The big down side is it is hugely time intensive.

Going forward the time required to do it will probably remove the ability from small business owners doing it themselves so they will have to pay for it.

As with anything else the efforts must be worth the return, clients of mine have in the past commented that building links seemed pointless until they realised that ranking higher in natural search would lower their reliance on pay per click.

A quick look at your inbound links tells me you've done a grand job of building links to your site

Going forward the time required to do it will probably remove the ability from small business owners doing it themselves so they will have to pay for it.

And there we have the catch22 - smaller players will feel they need to buy or rent links (I personally don't believe they do, they just need to be clever about getting natural links) but they will more than likely buy their links from any one of these companies:

buy text links - Google Search and this in turn will get them penalised / banned from Google which will force them into hiring an SEO - I for one will not be happy about the source of the new clients coming to me.

 

[CaptainMoo]

Hi Guys,

Seems we need to clarify this as I see a few conflicting points in the thread.

Don't know how many know this already but straight from wikipedia:

"After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page (one of the founders of Google) was in search for a dissertation theme and considered - among other things - exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site."

As Google states in its mission statement its basically a vote from page A to page B. The more votes you have the better.

HOWEVER.................

The SE has of course improved.

Buying links is bad.

Renting links sounds like the seo company you spoke to were making things up.

Links from a relevant industry is good and anchor text much stronger.

I NEED IT EXPLAINED IN LAYMAN TERMS ?????????

If 10 of your friends recommended a plumber you would feel fairly comfortable with using him. If 10 other plumbers recommended him then even better, and if these people recommended him specifically for "bathroom plumbing" then for that keyphrase its even better.

If those people were being paid (or rented) to make the recommendation then would it / should it be as justified?

That's kinda the idea behind the linking strategy that makes up about 60-70% of the Google algorithm.

If you wish drop by at Moovin On Up - SEO, Ecommerce Web Design Solutions and hit the live chat button and one of the team will be happy to help more or feel free to just read up on the information we have on there.

 

[andrewburnett]

Hi CaptainMoo,

Am I right in assuming the wikipedia extract is from the entry about pageRank?

Buying links is bad.

As defined by Google, yes. However as discussed earlier in this post if I were to buy a link from you in the pub there is no way that can be tracked algorythmically (I am not advocating buying links, but merely pointing out that the logic behind this statement is flawed - read Rand Fishkin's statements on it to see that the greatest in our industry also do it.)

Renting links sounds like the seo company you spoke to were making things up.

A recurring annual fee for a link (as many websites and directories offer) can surely be viewed as renting links, or no? There are plenty of things made up by SEOs but personally I don't believe that renting links is one of them.

That's kinda the idea behind the linking strategy that makes up about 60-70% of the Google algorithm.

I wish it were possible to see the components that make up "the" Google algorythm, unfortunately it is precisely this "secret sauce" that gives Google their market dominance. Ultimately as SEOs we can only see the output of the algorythms (plural) and try to second guess which inputs may affect it.

Relevant industry links are certainly useful, but aren't we forgetting about "global" quality factors associated with the linking domain?

There are no smoke and no mirrors involved in SEO [Quote stolen from bigMouthMedia - who interestingly only have glass walls in their HQ - and with whom I am not affiliated ]

 

[CaptainMoo]

Hi Andrew,

Yeah the Wikipedia quote is concerned with PR.

Gotta agree with all your comments there as well, spot on.

 

[Adventurelife]

A quick look at your inbound links tells me you've done a grand job of building links to your site

Not good enough Lots more work to do and I have to admit I am finding it harder as the year go by.


And there we have the catch22 - smaller players will feel they need to buy or rent links (I personally don't believe they do, they just need to be clever about getting natural links) but they will more than likely buy their links from any one of these companies:

buy text links - Google Search and this in turn will get them penalised / banned from Google which will force them into hiring an SEO - I for one will not be happy about the source of the new clients coming to me.[/QUOTE]

Yeah not good business for you as real difficult to turn round once the big G has punished

Innovation is what is need when getting new links, many SEO types forget that links can also be an excellent source of real business rather than just juice to boost rankings.