I was asked a question that puzzled me a bit. here it is: What is the approximate ration between spam backlinks (blog comments, forum comments etc) and backlinks from index pages of good sites related to ours with PR3> ? Of course the answer will be only approximate though I believe such ration exists. Something like "One link from good PR4 site's index page is equal to 50 spam forum comments" (just an example of how the answer should be given) We are spending $1000 on forum/blog comments at the moment so our client asked if it would be PROBABLY better to spend our link building budget on link buying instead of spending it on low quality spam inlinks from zero PR inner pages of non relevant blogs and forums. Your opinion guys? (please don't tell me that spam is bad... yeah.. I know it) Thanks a lot in advance!
Forum links work... ASSUMING the forum and posts where you comment are relevant to the URL you are linking to and the keyword phrases are not all that competitive. But sure... 1 great link from the home page of a relevant PR3 or PR4 home page is likely going to be worth hundreds... maybe even 1000 or more crappy forum and blog spam links. The problem with "unnatural" link building techniques like forum sigs, blog commenting, article submissions, directory submissions, etc. is that these links loose their effectiveness over time as the thread, post, article, or directory page where the link appears falls deeper and deeper into the archives over time (and are less and less linked). You have to continue to add links every month just to maintain current rankings. It requires more and more links per month to gain rankings. It's synonymous to swimming upstream. For example, whey you publish a new blog post, it's linked to from the home page, category page(s), archive page, tag(s) pages, etc. Comments on these posts can give the sites linked to in the comments a nice boost initially (assuming the links are FOLLOW links). After 10 more posts on that blog, that post where the comment link appears typically rolls off the home page loosing its most powerful link. Suddenly the post is passing those comment links MUCH less "juice". After 10 more links in that month, the post will move to the 2nd page of the archive for that month. So instead of being linked to from every page on the site (like the 1st page of the archive is), that 2nd page of the archive is now ONLY linked to from the 1st archive page. So the 2nd archive page passes the post much less juice to the post than was being passed when the post appeared on the 1st page of the archive. Same when 10 more posts are added to that category. When you get a link on the home page of a site (or even a link on ANY page of a traditional non-web 2.0 type site), that link will generally continue to be effective and NOT lose its effectiveness over time. In fact, it may get better with age as the site linking to you gains PR, authority, trust, etc.