Buying links for traffic purposes is a waste of money
With google suposedly cracking down on so called ‘paid links’; sites that sell them as well as sites that purchase them a lot of webmasters are now advocating purchasing links strictly for traffic to avoid any penalties by using ‘no follow’ attributes. Sounds like a good idea, huh? Buy links, get traffic, avoid any penalties and both parties (the link seller and buyer) are happy.
Unfortunetely, buying links for traffic purposes is a very bad idea for many reasons. First,the purpose of SEO is to rank higher on the search engines so you get free traffic and by using ‘no follow’ you forfeit this benefit, second paid links usually don’t bring in much if any traffic from the site which you purchased links from, and third economic theory dictates you will probably pay more for the links than you will be able to monetize the aditional traffic.
When you buy a text links for SEO purposses you are making an investment in your website. The purpose of the link is to help you rank higher so you can get free, targeted traffic. By investing in the links, your site can earn more money from the additional traffic resulting from the higher rankings. However, no follow non-seo links won’t allow your site to rank higher in the search engines and you relinquish that benefits of free traffic.
Second, you usually don’t get much traffic from links. From personal expierience I have done links exchanges with my myspace site www.myspace-resource.info and the vast majority of sites I exchanged with don;t bring in much traffic. Only one site I have exchanged with brings in decent traffic, but that site gets over 10,000 visitors a day. And even then, we’re only talking maybe 100-200 uniques a day. Good, but not nearly enough to make your site a success. For most niche s, however, you will get much less traffic. Myspace happens to be a very high traffic niche. If you’re buying traffic links from a legal or medical site much trafifc will you get? Not much maybe 10 visits a day if you’re lucky.
Third, economic theory dictates you will pay more for the traffic gnerated from the links than you will make monetizing the traffic. Savvy webmasters caculate the average CPM for their pageviews. Then they estimate how many pageviews their site loses by adding an outbound link, and calculate a monthly total. Then when they sell a link they charge that amount plus an aditional markup to make a profit. But now you have to not only monetize the traffic to match the CPM from the site you bought the link from, but you must also surpass the premium as well. So now you’ve dug yourself into a pit.
My advice is if you’re going to purchase links, purchase then for SEO and traffic purposes, but be careful. Don’t buy links form unrelated sites; otherwise your site may get peanalized or the link wont pass any link ‘juice’. If you follow this rule you should not incur any difficulties when purchasing links.
4 Responses to “Buying links for traffic purposes is a waste of money”
Comment from Internet Marketing Students
Time October 17, 2007 at 8:19 pm
I’ve always been a firm believer in organic SEO, so I’m riding the same boat.There certainly are new ways to online marketing nowadays but there are free traffic sites really work if you know how to work them.
Comment from Jack Rack
Time October 18, 2007 at 3:29 am
Valentin, nofollow does not just apply to google, Yahoo and Microsoft also “respect” the tag. Yahoo and Google actually announced the existence of the nofollow tag on the same day, a cold winter morning in 2005. It was their way of waving the white flag. “We don’t know how to fight spam. Our algo isn’t sophisticated enough, so the webmaster community is going to have to help us.”
Comment from Anonymous
Time October 18, 2007 at 7:41 pm
How do I use the rel=”nofollow” attribute to help combat weblog comment spam?
Yahoo! Slurp obeys the rel=”nofollow” attribute for links. web publishers and blog owners can apply a rel=”nofollow” attribute to any hyperlink on their page to indicate that the link may not be an approved or trusted link. Slurp may use a “nofollow” link for discovering content, but the link will not be considered an “approved” link for consideration for ranking of the target page.
This attribute works to reduce the benefits of comment abuse. For instance, websites with public comment areas can apply a “nofollow” attribute to publicly entered links to fight comment spam.
As I said, nofollow is used as ranking method only by google. I was not very clear, but to this aspect I was thinking on previous comment.
Google overraise the value of nofollow to all and any, not to what was the meaning of, mean antispam. Google want to enforce nofollow (then lowering ranks) to paid links, both for seller and buyer - is what allready happen.
nofollow was a optional thing, google raised to the level of “not used = PR penality”.
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Comment from Valentin
Time October 16, 2007 at 6:34 pm
rel=nofollow is valid just for google SE. Any other SE have no connection with this.
Is a very risky move from google, yet them PR ranking system was allready enforced and pointed as “reliable” …
Actualy, a webmaster mass removal of nofollow and full disrespect for google traffic would bring google down as reliable SE and traffic generator.
This 99.99% won`t happen because majority of webmasters have not the knowledge, the balls and the mental-training to be able to make a strike back toward google - some depend on G traffic, some depend on adsense income … and so on. And not to forget some “webmasters” simply are “gurus” followers - while most of “gurus” won`t risk - don`t want - have opposite interest than a fight with big G, …
Yet I try to stay optimistic