Buying text links. It’s all the rage.
Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?
These are the questions on webmasters’ and search marketers’ minds. What follows is my take on buying text links.

There’s nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people’s sites are none of the search engines’ business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don’t need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads.

So what’s the big deal?

Here’s where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I’m sure, and no big news to the search engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site’s popularity for years.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do — but so do search engines.

To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really gotten complicated for them.

Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today’s text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you’re going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That’s more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.

Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it’s not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites — especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable “footprints” behind in the code. It would be no trouble at all for a search engine to do a little digging into what the latest footprints are, seek out all pages that have them, and simply not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty, mind you. It would just be a way for the search engines to count only votes and not ads. Your ads would still be worthwhile for the exposure and direct traffic they bring, but not for providing you with link popularity. So although your site wouldn’t technically be penalized, its rankings could drop if it was dependent upon the link popularity of paid links.

For those of you who don’t believe the search engines can or would do this, you obviously haven’t been paying attention over the years. What do you think every major update at Google has been about? They haven’t been specifically about purchased link ads, but they have been about finding a subset of pages that all have similar characteristics and no longer allowing them to count the way they used to count towards rankings. Which means every page using the technique in question suddenly finds their rankings have dropped like a rock.

It’s not a matter of *if* this will happen with paid text link ads, but *when*. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we’re going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you’re buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn’t really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time. It’s no big deal if you’re getting real traffic from your ads, or if you’re simply using them to jumpstart your SEO campaign. It’s going to be a problem only if your livelihood depends on buying or selling text link ads to boost link popularity. ]]> http://www.darkcloudhosting.com/2009/10/06/why-buying-text-links/feed/ 0 http://www.darkcloudhosting.com/2009/09/06/seo-and-the-bottom-line/ http://www.darkcloudhosting.com/2009/09/06/seo-and-the-bottom-line/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:56:26 +0000 admin http://www.darkcloudhosting.com/?p=17

A question on many Webmaster’s minds these days is whether or not they should bother with optimizing their site to rank high in the search engines. We’ve discussed this in previous articles, and it always seemed to come down to a big “it depends.” However, I’m starting to realize that for many clients, good search engine rankings can actually make or break a business.

While putting together my presentation for a conference in Amsterdam back in Jan. 2001, I decided to base my speech around one Web site we had recently worked on for a client. The site in question was the Bariatric Institute of Kentucky in Georgetown, Kentucky. Dr. Randall Bolar performs gastric bypass surgery on morbidly obese patients so they can lose weight and lead happier, healthier lives.

Do you have money to burn?

The work we did for this site lead to a very successful optimization. Dr. Bolar had originally let his Web design firm handle his site submission and, as he put it, he “might as well have taken the $1,000 out of his pocket and lit it on fire!” When we began work on the site, it had nearly no presence in the search engines and directories. After our optimization, it had achieved the desired top-10 results in most of the search engines and directories, for a number of relevant keyword phrases. Traffic had increased substantially, and users were finding the site through the intended keywords. Since those are the metrics I look for when determining our success, this appeared to be quite a successful optimization, indeed!

However, I realized that I had never actually asked Dr. Bolar how effective the Web site had been in attracting new patients to his office, which of course, is the bottom-line. So I dashed off an e-mail to Dr. Bolar, asking if he had received a lot of new inquiries and new patients over the past few months since the rankings had taken hold. Within a half hour, and on a Sunday no less, Dr. Bolar called me to answer my questions. Here’s what he told me:

Before their optimization, they were getting approximately 2 – 4 new patients a week through their Web site. Once the rankings kicked in, these numbers jumped to a whopping 50 – 70 new patients a week!

Dr. Bolar told me that he went from having a struggling practice that nearly went bankrupt and closed down, to a thriving practice. He’s currently in the process of looking to hire another surgeon. Nearly all of his new patients have found him through the Web site. He even had one patient who drove 7 hours to his office and has gotten numerous other patients from out-of-state. The very next day, in fact, he was seeing 11 new patients, all of whom had found him through the Internet. Dr. Bolar’s Internet presence has enabled him to move from being a very small clinic — Georgetown Surgical Clinic — to a much larger institution — the Bariatric Institute of Kentucky!

All I could say was, “Wow!”

Was it just a fluke?

This startling revelation made me wonder how some of our other clients’ businesses may have been impacted by being easily found in the search engines, so I dashed off a few more e-mails and eagerly awaited the responses. Again, each one had nothing but great things to say about the effects of good search engine placement for their bottom line.

Joe Tedesco of JE Brown told me that his company had spent thousands of dollars on advertising at the same time they did their optimization. Their results were good, but not compared to their total outlay. They decided to lay off the advertising and re-think their marketing strategy, but when they stopped the advertising, they realized that it had little to no effect on their bottom line. The majority of their visitors were coming through the search engines! Joe says he’s a big believer in Search Engine Optimization because of the “little to no work that’s involved once the rankings are achieved.”

I also heard back from Kathy Drewien, from Atlanta Relocation. Most of Kathy’s clients find her services through her Web site, so search engine visibility is extremely important to her. Kathy told me that in1998, before her Web site optimization, she had 14 Internet transactions that grossed $100,000 in commissions. In 1999, after a successful optimization, those numbers increased to 22 transactions for $121,500 in gross commissions. Again in 2000, she had 22 transactions for a total of $165,939 in gross commissions.

Content is still king

It’s important to note that simply being found in the engines isn’t always enough. Once found, your Web site still has to sell its products or services. I believe that a big reason why our optimized sites end up getting so much new business is because we increase the overall appeal of a Web site when we work on it. That is, we write great, professional marketing text, and suggest other changes that may give the site a more professional appearance. These things are just as important to the bottom line, as getting the High Rankings® in the first place.

It’s true that not all businesses will achieve the same kinds of return on investment from a successful optimization as the sites discussed here. However, when you consider the low cost of SEO compared to other forms of marketing, your bottom line may increase substantially. Just make sure you find the right specialist for your needs. All Search Engine Optimization consultants are NOT created equal!

The best way to start all of this is to sign up to different Social Networking sites such as Myspace or Facebook. It is quick, easy and very painless in signing up and getting started with your profile.

There are many premade layouts, themes and skins for Myspace so if you are not the best with web design and CSS you can use one of these and edit it but be sure to include plenty of back links to your website all over the page using anchor text for keywords for your site.

Once you have built your profile / page you have to remember you need to keep up to date with other users and especially people who visit your page.

The best way to do this is to constantly add new content which is relevant to the people / audience who view your profile to keep them interesting and maybe adding you as a friend (There is a link to your profile, in return links to your site from there)

Relationships With Other Community Members

Just having a profile on these sites will help you with SEO slightly you can get involved with discussions and debates about certain things. If your website is based on say “Computer Repair” then take a look for articles, posts and forums within this niche. If somebody has a problem with their PC then try your best to help them out. This will not only get a back link to your site but it will also give a great representation of your services to other members and you can maybe sneak a few keywords in here or there along the way.

So I Have Many Friends, Now What?

Once you have built up relationships with other members you can start to advertise to them with things like Bulletins. I don’t suggest you go onto all of their profiles and leave comments with big pictures saying “Hey, have you seen our new site” as people will just get annoyed with you.

If you use press releases within Bulletins then it is a great way to let hundreds of people see your articles and content which will in turn persuade them to take a look at your site (You can also sneak another couple of backlinks in there)

Using Facebook for SEO

Facebook is great in the way that it sends out alerts everytime you make even the slightest change to your profile. If you add a picture, add a comment or do anything it will tell everybody about it.

This means when you update a link, everybody will be told about it and 95% of the time if they are your friend they will take a look at it to see what you have been up to (People are nosey like that)

As well as having school friends, work colleagues you can also do a search for people by interests etc. So if you run a band website you can do a search to see who likes the same band and keep them up to date with new articles on yoru site which they will be keen to read. This type of traffic is the best sort because it is genuine traffic and people have an interest in the content.