Hello Experts, Bought a Life Science site some time ago that has a PR7 home page with all other pages PR 6. It's got top 10 keyword for Life Sciences but fairly modest traffic. The thing is it's an old site that just republishes Life Science related press releases and news, has a nice free directory and a modest fee based job posting page. I don't have a lot of time to put into the site myself but have been considering hiring a couple writers believing good stories would boost traffic. To fund this I have been considering selectively selling links. I know there are potential risks to being sandboxed by Google, but it's the only way I can think of to fund in order to take the site to a higher level traffic. Do you think it's too big a risk?
If the majority of your traffic comes from google then you should reconsider your tactics. Adding unique content to your site will help in terms of serps as well as traffic but google frowns on selling links. You can side step this by selling image ads...just do not advertise this fact on the same site that the ads will be shown on.
So a follow-up question. On the one hand selling links are frowned on, but almost everyone advocates link exchanges. If blogrolls are used for link exchanges, can't paid (related topic) links be easily slipped in? Or are blogrolls a bad idea too?