Jim Boykin gives some snapshots of his link valuation tool and discusses a bit of his link buying / link building strategy:
Keep in mind that we don’t go for homepage links (99% only powerful subpages), and we work on getting links within the content area of webpages (something that looks like this), and sometimes we add co-citation (something I don’t want to talk about today). And yes, if we can get our ads above the fold, with a nice banner to boot, that’s even better (but not always possible).
So there’s how we valued links last month.
More from Putting a Price on a Link – Jim’s Value Indicators.
Speaking of link buying, Michael Graywolf has a nice roundup of Text Link Ads along with some of his own thoughts on link building:
So what are some tips for buying links, first of all choose relevant on topic websites. For example even though you are selling shoes, and everyone needs and wears shoes, don’t buy an advertisement on a digital camera website just because it has a low alexa ranking (low is good). Instead choose a fashion, clothing, or shopping site.
Secondly don’t buy just one link.
Don’t expect one link to do everything for you, start with a handful and go from there. Buy links for a medium length of time, at least 6 months. Do a check up half of the way through and make sure things are moving in the right direction.
Don’t buy for soley link popularity, instead buy for traffic. While Alexa is only one metric, anything below 10,000, the site will have real traffic. If you aren’t getting any direct ROI from that traffic, re-evaluate what and why you are buying those advertisements.
So, do you have any tips on buying and building links?
We are highly selective on link buying, the links need to be in visible spots on highly trafficked portals or its a no-go.
Contrary to popular belief, a nofollow link “is” acceptable as it shows in a Google backlinks check and is believed to pass PageRank in all Search Engines, again, traffic is really what we are buying now as it can be more effective than rankings.
We also air on the cautious side as Google tends to penalize sites for buying some links, or buying too many, so they need to meet the right criteria of acceptable advertising, which is traffic, relativity and placement on the page.
seoimage, I agree with what you say apart from the nofollow comment – maybe it does pass pagerank and appear in google’s backlinks but that means nothing if it has no affect on rankings (the idea of nofollow is to ensure that no ‘linkjuice’ is passed on, i.e. it won’t pass any authority that will help you benefit in the SERPs)
are you guys sure that nofollow link pass page rank?
Regarding building links, we still like the good old press release. We spend the money on a good release and distribution. Most of the time we get good results. We also buy links — we’ve been pretty successful at getting one-time payments on some high quality sites too.
I would also like some confirmation on the nofollow passing page rank or linkjuice.
On the nofollow passing juice:
http://dallas-seo.blogspot.com/2006/11/nofollow-does-it-really-work-like.html
http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php
On my own tests I have also found that Google indexes the keywords in the nofollow anchors.
Not sure about the PageRank though.
My only recommendation, don’t buy them for any other value than the visitors it will bring. If you are looking for link juice, don’t expect it. If you get PageRank or back links from it, great, if not (most likely the case long term) oh well. You bought the link for the visitors it would bring directly!
Checkout http://churchwebsitedesign.timothyfish.net/Article.asp?ID=45. This guy has a tool to calculate the value of a link. He isn’t the first with a tool like that, but his approach puts the emphesis on what a link is worth to the person who is buying the link rather than how popular the site is. He says that the value of a link on a less popular site is no less valuable than one on a popular site. The concept seems to be that a click through is a click through and it doesn’t really matter where it came from.
thanks for the informations.
What about those link cost calculators, like @ build-reciprocal-links.com and text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php. Do they really get close to true value? I find they really differ in estimations.
I have to disagree with some of the comments here. If you don’t go after search engines (which bring most sites the bulk of there traffic) at all, then you are doomed to fail. Getting search engine rankings should be a priority. I know that obtaining links for traffic is the pragmatic thing to do, but everyone thinks about search engine rankings when obtaining links. Or at least they should be.
k, nice article ;-)
k, nice article ;-)