Paid Links vs Free Links

I have noticed that alot of you purchase your links from relevant sites. My question is 2 fold..

First- What is the total amount that you budget for links per year.

Second - is it possible to build a respectable site with good PR (5 or 6) without buying links at all?

My niche is pretty narrow, and many of the high quality links that I would like to grab require me to join associations or groups. These generally run about 300 dollars, per year, each. That would mean that 4 decent links with relevant anchor text would cost me about 1200 dollars a year. I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna pay that kind of money. Shouldn't I be able to get good links without a second mortgage?

 

No idea on a per year basis, I did make a thread here on DP this week to buy links and probably spent about $1500-2000 in total on it, which is way more than I normally buy. Off the top of head I guess I have spent $50k on links in the last year, across a whole load of websites.

Absolutely. There are literally millions of websites that have not bought links and are way higher PR than that. I've no idea what type of site you are planning, but if its something good quality, unique and useful in some way then people could link to it for free which will result in a PR increase for you. Off the top of my head as an example, http://www.xe.com is pagerank8 and don't buy links.

It depends on a few things. The quality/pr/traffic of the site that the links are going on will dictate the price. Also the niche matters. If buying those links will help you rank and you know your site will make money then maybe $300 per link is cheap. I've seen some links sold for $1000 per month.

 

Your budget for paid links would depend on the competitiveness of the market. For some markets it would take far more links to rank well compared to less competitive market. $1200 a year isn't all that much if it can get you search engine rankings that produce sales on a daily basis. Some people recommend spending as much to advertise a website as they would to advertise a regular offline business.

If cost is a big concern for you, keep going with free seo. You may be able to get the rankings you desire without spending a cent. Don't focus too much on PR though. You don't need PR5 or PR6 just to get good rankings.

 

1. Zero. I don't buy any links.. it's just waste of money for me.
2.Yes. If you have a site with good quality content, the incoming links will automatically come and you'll get a good PR.

 

wihout paying for the link, you will need to create something unique/awesome so that people link to you. Otherwise, you gotta buy link to compete.

 

Well at the next pagerank update I am expecting my currently 2 month old blog to get PR 5 - And I have never bought any links, nor have other webmasters decided to link to me (except the odd one or two)
If I worked harder I could make that a PR 6 instead, but it's too much work
(Tip: It's all about commenting)

 

Can you expand on this?
You are not buying links and other webmasters dont link to you because they like you content.
So pr5 will come from god???

 

I don't know about selling & Buying Links budget for links per year.... Because I m doing Organic.....
If you have Good Content so, you get Quality Back links & Simply Grow u r PR....

 

Thats an optimistic point of view. If you run a commercial site then people are far less likely to link to you. In some small niches, the only other people with on-topic sites have a financial interest in staying above you in the serps so they aren't going to link to you.

Extreme examples - viagra and hair loss sites. Nobody is going to link to your sites and say they have used your products as it would be embarrassing for them. To succeed in those markets you would need to buy a lot of links.

 

It's pretty much impossible to attract links when you run some sort of a commercial site.
It's depends on your niche and site. In some cases buying links is your only choice.

 

Sadly, this is true! Over the last two weeks myself and my staff have attempted to place comments on relevent blogs that are spot on to my site. We placed one comment per site with a link back to our site so as not to in any way spam the blogs. I have a copy of every comment and they were all 3 or so sentences long, in direct response to the article, and clearly added something to the discussion. All were do follow. The comments were spaced over pr 1 through 4 blogs We placed a total of 35 comments on 35 different blogs. None were accepted. Draw whatever conclusions you like but my conclusion is this: The comments that were accepted were all from other blogs, or random people, none of them commercial sites. Virtually all of the comments were worthless along the lines of "Nice shoes", or "I wonder is Angelina Jolie would wear those" so the quality of posts was not the reason they were not accepted. Clearly commercial sites DO have a handicap and I do not suggest commercial sites waste their time using the blog commenting as a means of getting back links as it is a waste of time unless their niche is different from ours.

I don't think this applies particularly to commercial sites and if so in a diminished sense. People going to a commercial site do want good content like everywhere else, just not as much a factor. Competition is a factor I don't see much discussed around here as there is a sort of pollyanish perception that good content will conquer all. Good content is important, but in a competitive reality link acquisition seems to be much more important and unfortunately for me buying links is inescapable.

Agree, site owners, like you have gotten very sophisticated and are selective about who links in, and why. As a blog owner I don't particularly want sites using my blog as a link dump although my blog is very new and not well trafficked. I wonder why these blog owners even have comments as many are empty, the discussion level is non existent and they don't allow relevent sites to drop links no matter how good the comments are?

Organic linking strategies are great and will work for many of you but not for everyone. I am seeing that much of what works for one does not work for everyone. In my niche I continue to look for blogs that allow linking and I am sure I will find some low pr sites from time to time and I will use them. Clearly paid links are our only recourse, at least in it the mean time.

 

Well Richchromo what you are doing is bordering on spam. I bet you used keyword anchor texts and that (combined by the fact the link is pointing to a commercial site) is the reason they were deleted.

Maybe you read the form wrong, but that box said "Your Name", not "keyword stuffing here please"

I run some pretty big sites, pr5-6, and on some parts we do allow comments. Of course they are nofollow but that doesnt stop the spammers. If anything even remotely smells of spam, not only do I delete it but I flag it as spam to make it harder for them to comment again anywhere else.

Some indicators of spam:

• Keyword spamming in name field
• IP originating out of India
• Same IP used with different usernames/comments
• Comment of less than a sentence
• Comment in broken English
• URL Pointing to a commercial site
• URL pointing to a low quality site

If I see a single one of those its reported as spam and IP blocked.

 

It is always possible to built a site to very good PR without spending a penny. In fact big G wants it that way. This is answer to your first question and it also give the answer to the first question.

 

It's all down to content I guess. If you've got something unique and useful people will link to it IF they find it. If you've got a zero effort website flogging some tat or other who's gonna link to you and why should they? In that case you simply have to break the rules and buy links.

It's tough.

d

 

No..So far I never get involved in buying links. First of all, budget limitation and second don't want to end up getting penalized. But nevertheless, I still believe it's somehow possible to achieve high PR if we continue to build backlinks and at the same time provide quality content added frequently. I hope I will be there someday.

 

I don't want to buy links. I am more into build unique content. and i am getting nowhere so far

 

hahaha will surly looking for the update and waiting to get the source from you once your 2 months old blog get PR of 5 on PR update...

Please tell me when the PR update is going to happen..

 

But you should do some basic (free of charge) link building... and you may get something.. at least in PR...