I have decided to blog about why buying links for traffic purposses is a bad investment and should be avoided. A lot of SEO gurus are now advocating buying links for traffic and not SEO to avoid possible penalties. But it isn't a good deal for the webmaster buying links. You can buy SEO based textlinks without penalties if the links are relevant to your site.
Complete and utter tosh. Search engine optimization is exactly that; the optimization of content for search engines. It is not about buying links in a futile attempt to obtain PageRank. You say that using the rel="nofollow" attribute means that you forfeit the benefit of getting "free" (I think the word you are looking for here is organic) traffic. How exactly? All that the rel="nofollow" attribute means is that search engines will not consider that particular link as a vote. This doesn't stop you from getting indexed or marketing your site via an advertising campaign. It just stops you from manipulating the PageRank algorithm by essentially buying PageRank. Personally I buy links for traffic all the time and I'm benefiting from it each and every day. Unfortunately you aren't seeing the same results. Instead of writing it off why don't you stop and think for a second that you might actually be doing something wrong? - Matt
Excellent post by MattB (must spread reputation before giving him any more), but total and complete BS on the part of IAmNed. Not even worth reading.
Instead of buying links I think optimizing a site is much better. You will get permanent traffic if you optimized the site well.
You are nuts. My buddy pays for a few high traffic banner links and text links on completely related sites and he makes a killing. He has a membership site that does like 20k+ a month. I admit I did not read your blog, but why should I considering the above and your title?
I have bought links and gotten traffic from them for a couple of years now. I also am on page on of Google for hundreds of unique keyword phrases and get traffic from that. There is no substitute for getting traffic in many different ways as a hedge against one of them being up or down at any given time.
I find that natural results get far more clicks than paid ones, so you get more traffic and save money if you can get your website in the top 5 results in Google for your niche. I like to make my money the free way, which should not be underestimated. You should check out the ThirtyDayChallenge by Ed Dale and Dan Raine. No, I don't work for them, I did the thirtydaychallenge and it was awesome or I wouldn't recommend the strategies they teach. They give away information that others charge thousands for!
Buying LIns = PageRank SEO = Traffic So, never ever expect any traffic while buying links. Thats a fact.
The OP seems to think that SEO is an end in itself - it's not, the end is to get more (and targeted) traffic. If you're buying links from a related site you may well get useful traffic. Nofollow? no page rank? if you're buying the link for traffic those things are irrelevant.
My opinion is that buying links just for traffic purposses is a waste of money. A lot of people do buy links just for traffic, but in my opinion i think it is a lousy investment because it wont help your site rank higher and from my analysis you dont get much traffic from links. Ranking high in search engines will give you more traffic, and you get traffic from the link as well. That seems like a better deal. I get thousands of visits a day for some keywords and that wouldnt be possible without SEO based links. I may only get 100 visits a day from websites that link to my site.
You're still completely missing the point - there are other ways to get traffic to your site that nothing to do with search engines. Some of them work better than others, they may or may not all be cost effective, - but to dismiss all other forms of getting visitors because they don't increase your page rank is incredibly short-sighted.