The war on Paid links is in full gear. buying and selling links without the nofollow tag is now
officially a black hat SEO practice that is against
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google has and will continue to penalize sites
that flagrantly buy and sell links. If you are
buying or selling links: do it covertly do it under
the radar.
However, in many instances there may be a
better option that trying to buy a link from a site:
buy the site outright. While this won’t work
for a large newspaper site, those links have long
been void of link juice anyway. In fact, anyone
who is openly selling may already have their
link juice passing privileges revoked.
So who does that leave? Generally, the sites you
can still buy links from that can pass link juice
(help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to
medium sites with a single owner or decision
maker. In those instances, where you’ve already
gone through the bother of finding out who
owns the site and getting in contact with them,
why offer to buy a link for a few thousand a
year? Wouldn’t you be better served by just
making an offer on the entire site?
If you bought the site you’d get any revenue it
was producing, any potential appreciation from
the domain name, and total editorial control
(you could link to some or all of your other sites)
. Sites aren’t as cheap as they were a few years
ago, but you’d be surprised how many people
will jump at $10 or $15k. Hell, even monsters
like Adult Friend Finder are only selling for only
3X EBITDA.
So if you are going to ask someone to buy a link,
perhaps the first question you ask them
shouldn’t be “Would you sell me a link on this
page for X/year?” but rather “Can I buy your site
____ from you for $XYZ?”.
If you buy the entire site then you’re no longer
violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by
changing where it links. It’s not like we actually
give a shit, but . . . ya know . . .
officially a black hat SEO practice that is against
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google has and will continue to penalize sites
that flagrantly buy and sell links. If you are
buying or selling links: do it covertly do it under
the radar.
However, in many instances there may be a
better option that trying to buy a link from a site:
buy the site outright. While this won’t work
for a large newspaper site, those links have long
been void of link juice anyway. In fact, anyone
who is openly selling may already have their
link juice passing privileges revoked.
So who does that leave? Generally, the sites you
can still buy links from that can pass link juice
(help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to
medium sites with a single owner or decision
maker. In those instances, where you’ve already
gone through the bother of finding out who
owns the site and getting in contact with them,
why offer to buy a link for a few thousand a
year? Wouldn’t you be better served by just
making an offer on the entire site?
If you bought the site you’d get any revenue it
was producing, any potential appreciation from
the domain name, and total editorial control
(you could link to some or all of your other sites)
. Sites aren’t as cheap as they were a few years
ago, but you’d be surprised how many people
will jump at $10 or $15k. Hell, even monsters
like Adult Friend Finder are only selling for only
3X EBITDA.
So if you are going to ask someone to buy a link,
perhaps the first question you ask them
shouldn’t be “Would you sell me a link on this
page for X/year?” but rather “Can I buy your site
____ from you for $XYZ?”.
If you buy the entire site then you’re no longer
violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by
changing where it links. It’s not like we actually
give a shit, but . . . ya know . . .