Paying for Links

As beginner or intermediate Search Engine Optimisers you’re probably going to be exposed to a lot of ‘paid links’. If you’ve been following the series of blogs, you’ll probably be a little apprehensive to pay for anything – and you still should be.

If you see a blog post or an article that has content similar to that of your page, and you decided to approach the webmaster, they will probably ask for a small fee. Be careful, this could be either for a year, or the life of the website. The amount that you should pay for one of these links will depend on the quality of the website, and to an extent the amount that you are willing to pay. For a very good link, you shouldn’t have to pay more than £150 per year, although the average (£50) is much lower than this.

You may be asked, or offer to write your own content for another person’s website or blog (guest blogging). This has the advantage of you being able to choose the post content, the location and anchor text of the link and the length of the post. Depending on the webmaster, you may still be asked to pay for the post – because the link juice from that domain will be passed to your blog. That being said, many will allow you to do this for free as it is providing more quality content for their website.

The benefit of this is that over time, domain trust and rank will be passed onto the blog page. This will then be passed through the link to your page, giving you a long term benefit.

Be careful of ‘Link Dumping’ Blogs – blogs that serve no real purpose apart from hosting reciprocal links, articles or blog posts. Over time the trust and authority of these will decrease, and as a result so will the quality of the link that you may have paid for.

Link Building Top Tips

• Generally avoid blogs hosted on blogging platforms, such as .wordpress.com, .blogger.com. Also, avoid anything that looks like a referral site.
• As far as possible, offer content as payment, or content exchanges.