Just started to learn about SEO and back links and was confused if it matters where on the site your link is placed. For example abc.com puts my link on their homepage or they put it on abc.com/xyz does the homepage give more weight to a link or are they both equal in the eyes of the search engines? Also do people buy links on sites and the site owner just makes a special page with only links on it? This page would not be on their sitemap or linked to from their site. It would seem to easy to do this since most site owners wouldn't care since your link is basically hidden and they won't lose any traffic. Or they could even make the link match the background color.
It depends, if the homepage is stronger (meaning it has more backlinks, gets more traffic, more exposed), then the homepage links have more weight. The same goes for subpages. The main reason why people buy links is to get QUALITY backlinks. They won't pay for links on hidden pages I mean, who would SPEND MONEY on a link that won't even be exposed to the public? People should be careful when buying links.
Yes, that's correct 'coz usually in subpages links are in supplemental results unlike the website itself...
If the page is not accessible from the website by clicking on links, it's USELESS page and don't even try to think about paying for it. If the color of text matches the background color it's suspicious and I would never deal with people who do that.
If webmaster is hiding your link with similar colred background or you don't find the "link page" link on the home page, then there is no use linking to them. Besides some webmasters have link from the home page but have "nofollow" attribute in their Meta tags of link page. This again is wrong and wouldn't benefit you at all.
Even though surfers won't find the link will the search engines still see it as a backlink and give me credit for it? I'm trying to get some backlinks for the sake of increasing my site ranking and not caring if surfers find the links and click on them. If you get a backlink that is hidden from the public, it seems the engines would still give you the credit for having a backlink. So you would be happy that you got a backlink and the site your link is on would be happy since they won't have their users clicking your link and leaving there site.
every link is good, except when it's against terms of service. So no invisible links and no graphical 1pixel links. And no hidden pages with link on. Google, without doubt, makes your homepage the highest weighted. But be aware of landing pages : http: // another.com http: // www. another.com http: // www. another.com / index.php http: // www. another.com / index.html and http: // www. another.com / default.asp are all DIFFERENT! in the eyes of Google so be careful how you link.
Links that are the same as the background colour of the website could fall under the Grey/Black hat SEO techniques. If your looking to build your website for a long period of time and want it to be something that will continue to prosper you don't want your website to be even remotely associated with that. Home pages tend to have better PR passing strength then subpages generally but that all depends. This rule only usually appears because webmasters usually tend to promote the homepage much more then subpages. But there are strong subpages for some webites that perform much better then the homepage. So you have to take it on a case by case scenario.
it depends on the page... if the subpages has a great and nice content,, it would be better to link to that subpage rather than linking from homepage that hasn't non-sense content...
Most likely the homepage will give you higher PR, but so long as the subpages are relevant to the site it's linking to it can give a greater weight.
For me it doesn't matter where is the link, the better one for it is to be placed on a relevant content page within the domain.