I own a software company which is almost 2 yrs old. I have been attracting links to my website naturally during the past 2 yrs. As from a month ago we set some targets for the rest of the year. We basically need to improve our traffic - by improving - i mean drastically improve. The rate of natural links was quite slow resulting in SE rankings of 10+ for our keywords. For some keywords we wish to rank we were not even in the top 20. So I decided to start buying links (10-15 quality links per week). The links come from blogs with varying PR of original with varying anchor texts. My questions are these: 1. How much links can I aquire on average (per week) without flagging myself? 2. How much does these links take to be effective. Days after I started buying links, I was seeing a slow improvements in SE rankings. For some keywords that I was ranking 15 I started ranking 9 then 7 then 5. But I noticed that my SE rankings flactuate whilst my competitors does not. Why? 3. Would investing in solely blog post link building flag me with SE? What other link building types do you suggest. 4. Would you in general think that 6-7 months of constant link building of 15-20 quality links per week give a good boost for my keywords? Or is it too fast? Thank you for your time
1) Google has a tough time at recognizing paid links on their own. So there is no maximum number of links you should buy. 2) You basically need a stronger link profile than your competitors. It is normal for rankings to fluctuate until you reach top 3 or 4. 3) The blog posting won't automatically get your flagged. There is the chance that anyone could report you for buying links and get your site penalized. Ideally you should be mixing in links from many other sources.....article directories, press release sites, directories, forums, etc. 4) 15-20 links per week is quite low. You can build links faster than that, but keep in mind what pace you will be able to maintain. You don't want to keep building lots of links and then just completely stop for a while. While paid links can be effective, they definitely carry some risk with them. So you should not rely on them so heavily. What would you rather have: safe stable long-term rankings or vulnerable risky rankings?
thank you vansterdam - very helpful. How will Google though verify that you are buying links? They could be simple reviews. If they will penalize you what will be the consequences? your domain will never rank? Thank you
It is tough to verify that you are buying links unless your link is clearly under a paid links or sponsors heading. More likely you would get caught due to association with the other websites that those blogs link to. Theoretically if a blog links to several websites who obviously buy links, the other sites they link to are likely paid links too. Websites also get caught by being part of link broker networks like text link ads. That being said, I haven't heard of many websites getting penalized for buying links. It seems that Google is more going after the sellers instead. Who's to say if that trend will continue or not though. There are different levels of penalties. For more severe TOS infractions, your domain could be blacklisted and lose its ability to rank well. For lesser infractions, it is common to just be bumped back 50 spots or so in the rankings. So you are taking a risk, but it may not be a huge one. One thing you should know about blog reviews is that they give rankings boosts when they are first posted, but once they move to the 2nd page and the archives, the rankings benefits quickly diminish. So this combined with the risk, makes this strategy not very worthwhile. You would be better off buying a whole bunch of articles to submit to article directories and related sites.
The same will happen with article directories no? They will first give you a boost since they will appear on the main page, but when they disappear and are only linked from a category, their value will decrease.. But i will take your advice - i will alternate between articles and blogs... Regarding web directories - most of them offer paid listing - isn't that telling google that you are buying links? Do you think that forum signatures affect ranking that much?
Well with articles, over their lifetime they gradually get republished on more and more websites. Also if you submit to many article directories, each one will have their own approval time. The best article links you can get are when you convince a related site to publish your content. Then your article usually ends up a fairly static article section of their site. For whatever reason Google has not penalized any paid directory listings. It could be that there would just be too many websites to penalize for that. Also until very recently Google's webmaster guidelines was recommending submitting to directories including the yahoo paid directory. So they can't exactly penalize for something they have been recommending for years. Google cares more about links that pass PR, but most directory listings are on PR0 pages. Forum signatures aren't extremely beneficial, but they do add a little something. Basically you want as many links from as many trusted websites as possible. If you can easily get 247 links from a forum, why not do it? Every little bit helps.
Paid links are a fuzzy zone - effective, but risky. Buying is not as bad as selling, but a dramatic drop in rankings is not a pleasant thing to experience. Try to diversify your strategies, focus on your niche, do social bookmarking, publish press releases...
are press releases that effective? Why a lot of you are mentioning press releases? I have never tried press releases to be honest. Thank you for your feedback guys!