View of Different SEO Expert on Link Building strategies

Question One: What are the factors you would take into
account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link
broker or seller)?

Eric: It is 100% dependent on the outcome I’m expecting that link will cause, and the signal of intent that link may send to the search engines. That’s a fancy way of saying I never buy links with the intent of improving search rank, because I just don’t believe the risk is worth the reward. I know it’s old fashioned, but I don’t think it’s helpful to make Google’s job harder than it already is by seeding a bunch of paid links in nooks and crannies that might be credited as natural.

SEO and Link Building Video

Rae: I think there are numerous factors to take into account and it is hard to make a final decision on a link buy unless you’re looking at it. But, as a rule of thumb, I’ll take the following into account (in no particular order):

The age of the domain and the site that lives on that domain (i.e. if the domain was registered in 96, but has only been live for a year, in my opinion, it has a different value than one live for ten years), the quality of the site, the placement the link will have (in content vs. in sidebar vs. semi-invisible spots like the footers), the amount of text I can surround it with, the topic of the site (strongly related, somewhat related, I can create a relationship via a certain sub section or not related), the quality of the inbound links to the site/page I would be buying from, the price and the number of visitors it can actually send me. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice what I do *not* take into account.

Rand: I’d look at a lot of different items, but here are the primary 3:

1. Rank for the target search term(s) at the major engines
2. Relevance to the site/page in question from a human perspective, i.e. would people on that page be likely to click-through and convert?
3. How well do pages at the site generally rank against their competition?

Roger: Backlinks. Take a look at the backlinks then note any from the same site. Remove those similar sites and search again. So if you’re in Yahoo and you’re doing this:

1. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com
2. And find they have a bunch of inbounds from anotherlinkseller.com, do this:
3. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com -site:anotherlinkseller.com

Sometimes you’ll see the backlink count go down an astounding amount, like ten or thirty thousand backlinks. That smells fishy. I call it link kiting, where several link sellers link to each other to get their Google Toolbar green to a certain level. Also might want to visit some of the sites linking to them to make sure it’s not from one entity’s network, or from too few sites in their backlinks. So quantity of backlinks from different sites is good to understand, and hopefully you won’t easily spot signs of a network or common ownership.

When checking the backlinks, screen out links from .info domains. Sometimes the scraper sites may pump up the backlink count.

Also verify the quality of the content. Cheap bad content is the smell that lets you know something might be bad elsewhere.

That’s affirming the negative. You can affirm the positive by restricting your search to the dot edu and dot gov spaces: linkdomain:linkseller.com site:.edu

A site with a significant amount of backlinks from dot edu and dot gov sites must be doing something right?; right?

Todd: Testing the value of a link is critical. You really need to know the type of link popularity that is going to be passed to determine a monetary figure to associate with the link. This way you know what kind of deal you’re getting. There’s a few ways to associate a value with the link. The really easy way - use Rand’s page strength tool, or Text Link Ads Link calculator, to determine some type of value associated with what to spend on the link. It’s even more important that you understand what type of criteria they are using to come up with those values. I use these 10 tips to determine the value of a link, but generally concern myself with the most important 5 criteria to a link’s value