Thrudigital

I don’t buy links because there is no guarantee that such links will improve my rankings. This is the great secret in link-buying. Today I found buyblogreviews.com which offers quite cheap links. Spending $200-$300 on new incoming links wouldn’t kill me, but I don’t believe that such an investment will do much good. Let me explain…

Firstly, if you can buy a link on some blog, your competitor can do the same. So can thousands of others. So as time goes by, a post that contains a link to your website will appear several clicks away from the homepage. On blogs with more than 1 post per week it won’t be impossible to find older posts 40+ clicks from the homepage. In my opinion this doesn’t offer value for money, or good quality links. If you are spending $200 a month, the destination URLs should generate good revenue in order to make buying links worthwhile. However, there is one major advantage of links from blogs: the price is incomparable to that of pay-per-month links.

Pay-per-month links are often too expensive for an ordinary webmaster. If you only bought one or two links, they won’t probably increase rankings of the destination URLs enough to achieve top rankings for any competitive phrase. Usually it’s necessary to buy (or acquire in other ways) 20+ links to achieve reasonable rankings. When you’re going for very competitive phrases, then even 200-300 links of superior quality are necessary. Spending $10/month/link (usually at least $20/month/link, but let’s calculate using this simplified example) will mean $2000-$3000/month in links only. That’s a lot of money. The only party which profits from this is the broker that mediated the sale. Webmasters will not earn enough because you won’t buy 200 links from one website, and you will spend a fortune on inbound links each year.

But to prove my negative opinion about buying links accurate, I think that it would be a good idea to buy a few links and show you the results. Before I come to this stage, let’s analyse some other facts:

In the past I never bought a link that would point to this domain (web-developers.net). Despite this, it already achieved top rankings in Google. With no bought links, all we did was a natural (“organic”) SEO. Of course, making a few directory submissions may sound little spam-like, but I made an effort to diversify our SEO methods, and submissions to directories were only a secondary effort. To be honest, some positions could still be better. But one cannot be satisfied with the existing results, otherwise things will quickly start to crush down.

I also haven’t bought any links to point to aqua-fish.net, my primary domain. Once again, to be honest, some links resulting from sending donations to dog pounds could be considered as “bought”, but I didn’t request any special anchor text or other details. All in all, there are probably only two or three such links, and that website still receives high traffic.

It may be old-fashioned, but I still think that the best links are those acquired for free and without any contact with webmasters. When someone wants to link to your pages, you cannot stop this process. Links from educational websites (such as “the website of Mr John Doe’s class“) are free and I value them much more than other links, even links from DMOZ. Just imagine this: I place some useful PHP code on this blog, something that hasn’t yet been shared on the web yet, and some teachers find my solution. They then link to that page from their university websites, they tell other teachers about your site and the solution. Such popularity is very valuable, but to create something useful that can be discussed at universities or schools, it is necessary to write or create very unique and professional content (or tools, etc.) You will not simply succeed with another general “get loans fast” website. This is why many websites must buy links; because they won’t gain links any other way.

After I have explained how I work, it’s time to buy some links to prove or disprove the concept behind link-buying. I am going to spend $100 on links from blogs and we will see if it helps me to achieve better rankings. The result will appear on this page as soon as I notice some response from search engines (let’s try Google and MSN). I’d rather not mention details about which URLs I am going to buy links for, since someone very wise could report me to Google… it’s just a single-shot test.

Update 1 (Oct. 25, 17:44:39 UTC ): I have finished buying the first links. Up to now it has cost $45 and they should be online soon. More updates with further developments.

Update 2 (Oct. 26, 09:40:49 UTC ): I have placed nine orders, adding up to $100 in total. A few minutes ago I had to request corrections in one paid post since one of my website’s articles was copied, and links along with anchor texts were inserted randomly. Poor quality, but we will see how it goes since I am not going to pay for copy-and-paste posts. More updates coming soon.

Update 3 (Oct. 27, 08:31:20 UTC ): OK, more links are now online. The major problem is that some bloggers are not willing to write unique posts, and they simply copy-and-paste content from already existing articles. On the other hand, some bloggers posted unique posts which have been already indexed by Google. At the moment, my rankings are up: they have moved by between one and fifteen positions in Google for search phrases that refer to the anchor text. However, this may be a fluctuation, since the rankings are never static. It is still too early to judge accurately. I am still waiting for the rest of the bloggers to post their reviews.

Update 4 (Oct. 28, 10:19:08 UTC ): No progress yet. The positions are the same like before. Some links aren’t online yet because bloggers seem to be lazy (so why do they bid if they’re not willing to do the job fast?). I am sceptical about this thing, but let’s wait for MSN to react on these links.

Update 5 (Oct. 30, 22:06:06 UTC ): Some progress in MSN. Positions in Google are still the same. In addition, Google doesn’t react to modification of content (the age aspect). In MSN one page went from 5^th to 3^rd one. However, since I bought links for 3 articles, I am not yet sure about efficiency. Two paid blog posts have been picked up by MSN already, and some bloggers don’t mind writing the posts even though they placed bids! I will probably have to choose others. More updates coming soon.

Update 6 (Nov. 01, 21:43:14 UTC ): In MSN all rankings have been positively affected. More information coming soon (it’s too late for a well-written report).

Update 7 (Nov. 03, 14:25:38 UTC ): As promised, here’s the latest news. In MSN all positions for primary phrases are better. One URL jumped from 5th to 3rd place. Another moved from 4th to 2nd place, and one URL which wasn’t ranked in the top 50 is now in the top 20. In Google the changes aren’t visible yet, although one URL has jumped from 5/6th position to 4/5th. Another which was 9th for a long time is now at 7/8th. The last is also ranked better, though nothing significant has happened yet.

Now it’s clear that paid links help, so why am I still against bought links? Imagine that a completely useless website is given a lot of paid links. Sooner or later it achieves high rankings in MSN, and possibly in Google too. Useful websites will be moved to lower positions. Websites with high information value will be nowhere in the top 10, because the top positions will be occupied by sites benefitting from bought links. My question is this: what must happen in order to lower the importance of links?

I’ll keep updating this page as frequently as possible, or until rankings change.