Website promotion. Link purchase: pros and cons

Where and how can you buy links? What are the pros and cons of link purchase? Let us try to find out.

Situation one: a commercial website wants to buy an advertising link, i.e. a link that will advertise its products by referring to the page with a certain good or service. In this case it is reasonable to select websites devoted to the similar topic (working in the same target niche), but these sites must not be commercial. Thus you will deal not with your competitors, but with possible partners. It is better to select sites with high attendance and good rating.
They are offered to put a link to your goods or services. The conditions are discussed with the owner of each website separately. Where will your link be put? How will it look? How much will it cost? Etc.

The pluses are evident here: you receive the so-called target advertising for a small amount of money. People click on the link and come to your site – and all these visitors are initially interested in this topic. Thus we can receive the increase of the CTR (conversion rate) and, respectively, the increase of the sales from the site. The minuses are tiny – the selection of sites for the link exchange and correspondence about the conditions with them take a lot of time, especially an the initial stage of work. Besides, you will have to check these links from time to time (at least once a month), and it also takes time. Where there is demand, there is also supply: a lot of services, intended for automatic purchase of links from the main pages of websites (such as inkomp.ru), appear.

Situation two: purchase of links for improvement of the search ranking of the site. In such cases SEO specialists do not search for the partners on their own and do not carry on individual negotiations about the link purchase – it is troublesome and does not provide the mass coverage. Most SEO specialists and site owners use the services of the so-called “link exchanges”: sape.ru, xap.ru, mainlink.ru, promotext.ru and others.
The TOP of link exchanges engaged in link selling and purchase already exists in Runet (for instance, at seoadd.ru).

Be careful: before rushing to the link exchange it is worth estimating all the pros and cons of this kind of search engine optimization. Firstly, you should remember that link purchase is rational if you need to “raise” your site by highly competitive keywords (when you really cannot do without these keywords). Secondly, you should take a sober view of your budget and estimate the sum that you are ready to pay for the links at the first stage of your website's existence, when it brings zero profit.

So what are the pluses of link purchase?

1. The possibility to leave the competitors, who have high positions in the search engine rankings, far behind very quickly. It takes a lot of time to improve the positions of our site in a “natural” way; if you buy links and with their help receive high positions in the ranking, you can get to other kind of website promotion with peace of mind. In this case the profit from the site also will not take long.
2. If you study the functioning of the link exchanges carefully, you can try to buy the “packages” of links from the sites the topic of which is close to the topic of your site. It is good in all respects, because besides the ranking and attendance increase such links will also bring target clients.

Let us analyze the minuses of link purchase

1. Monopolist search engines (Google, Yandex) struggle against this method of website promotion more and more furiously. In December 2007 Google lowered the PageRank of the sites that were engaged in link purchase. Last year Yandex declared his negative attitude to the sites, that purchase links, more than once. In May and June 2009 all sites that took part in the functioning of the link exchanges noticed abrupt decrease of the PageRank (some of them lost 3 points of PR at once).
2. The effect of paid links is unstable, because the search algorithms constantly change, and the link that cost 50-70$ and brought you clients and profit yesterday may give zero effect tomorrow.
3. If you have staked on paid links only, it is a quite short-sighted strategy. You will have to pay again and again. As soon as you stop buying links, the ranking of your site lowers.

Summary: when you make up the marketing plan of website promotion, you can provide for the link purchase, but special emphasis should be laid on the creation of the unique, interesting and constantly updating content. Only in this case your site will have leading positions in its niche with the lapse of time, and you will not have to spend money on link purchase – you will become an attractive advertising platform for other websites yourself.

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website promotion web promotion, buy links, ctr conversion rate, link exchange, link selling, link exchanges, site ranking, google, yandex