SEO blog

Dangers in buying links discussed

If you’re like many webmasters, you know the importance of getting other relevant websites to link to you. This is old news, yes. However, there has been, on a continually growing basis, discussions about the dangers of purchasing links. Namely, that search engines will somehow punish your website for employing the use of paid links to increase your search engine rankings.

I’m all for purchasing links if you’ve got the capitol and are smart about it. Personally, I would never go after a link that would look severely out of place and was obtained without any visible merit: such as having a brand new 3 page website and instantly obtaining a prominent link from an eight year old PR7 website. That would seem a little fishy to me, and if search engines were somewhat smart (which they are), it’s likely that some algorithm could detect this anomaly and if there are repercussions for this; well, they would likely happen.

There’s a pretty good discussion going on over at the v7n.com forums. In particular I wanted to draw attention to what John Scott states in one posting on the form, regarding common mistakes when purchasing links:

1. Repeating the same anchor text in hundreds of link. Search engines can easily detect anything that isn’t unique. So keep it unique by varying the anchor text.

If you’re going for “web hosting”, for example, you could use dozens of variations: web hosting, affordable web hosting, quaity web hosting, click here for web hosting, etc, etc. Ideally each link should be unique.

2. Site-wide links. I never buy site wide links for link popularity/rankings. When I do buy site wide, I do so for traffic.

3. PR10, PR8, PR9 links - those make me nervous. It smacks of buying PageRank, and that’s one way to get on Google’s radar.

4. Irrelevant links. Don’t go buying links for your office furniture site from a script directory site.

5. Editorial integrity. Say you have a web hosting site, and a webmaster blog is selling links. If that webmaster blog is selling links to viagra sites and debt consolidation sites, don’t do it.

6. Going overboard. All things in moderation, including link buying.

7. Bought vs organic as a percentage. I believe that bought links should make up a small part of your overall link profile.

Whether or not there are major consequences for link buying remains to be seen by me, or seemingly anyone else that has responded in this conversation thus far.

Any thoughts on this?

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21.Feb.07 Link Building Comment (1)

On Page vs Off Page Optimization: Who Wins?

I’ve been around the seo block a few times in my now 5 years of dealing with website development and optimization; though I am only really catching on to how successful SEO works in the recent past.

As an ignorant webmaster - I was always religious about proper on page optimization techniques: Proper title, meta content, headings, keyword density, emphasized keywords with bold and italics, etc.  I’m by no means discounting the importance of these things. . . as then can, in some cases, play an important role in your search engine positioning.

However, once again I am reminded of the importance of incoming links, the anchor text used and other important factors related to off page optimization.  As pointed out in this post titled pagerank wins  - if on page factors determined website rankings: we’d have SERPS filled with “keyword spamming trash” as the author rightfully put it.  Here’s a little blurb from the page that I feel covers my point adequately:

SEO copywriters, for obviously self serving reasons, would prefer that Google place more weight on on-page elements. They would prefer that anchor text be discounted. They would prefer it if PageRank didn’t play such a large role in determining search engine ranking.

The argument goes likes this:

If my page contains the search terms in the page titles, in the H1 tags, and bolded and italicized in the body copy - then it is obviously more relevant than a page which doesn’t contain the search term in the page titles, H1 tags and body copy.

This idea makes sense until you realize the implications.

Google’s home page only mentions the word Google once in the page title, and once on the page. So if the SEO copywriters got their way, a search for Google would be dominated by any hack who loaded their page with obnoxious repetitions of the word Google.

If Google implemented an SEO copywriter’s algorithm, Google wouldn’t even be included in the search results for “search engine”.

If Google implemented such an algorithm, the search results for Computers would not include www.apple.com, www.dell.com, www.compaq.com or IBM’s home page.

If Google implemented such an algorithm, the SERPs would be dominated by keyword spamming trash.

In the end?  Good positioning in search engines is determined by your off page optimization efforts.

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17.Feb.07 Off Page SEO, On Page SEO Comments (0)