Linking for your clients goes beyond the reciprocal link trade and the infamous “link page” necessary to incorporate them all. Some “other” linking strategies include buying one-way links, paying someone else to perform your reciprocal link trade for you, or starting your own article program. In the first part of this four part series, the topic of buying one-way links will be discussed.
There are numerous places to buy one-way links. A couple of the major players include text-link-ads.com and textlinkbrokers.com. These link buying sites typically separate their links into appropriate categories such as Business, Sports, News, Music, Shopping, etc. etc. Typical costs for such links depend mostly upon the PR of the host page. After researching prices from various link-buying sites, I’ve created the following table to give a ballpark range of how much it costs to buy links on a per month basis.
PR Typical Range (per month)
4 $20-30
5 $30-50
6 $40-65
7 $50-150
8 $250-500
9 $1250-2400
If a typical client has approximately 45 reciprocal links, and the average cost of a PR5 link is $40 per month, this translates into a cost of $1800 per a month for a client to have 45 purchased one-way links to their site. If your approximate acquisition cost for each reciprocal link attained for your client is $8, than this means that your typical cost for acquiring 6 new reciprocal links per month (most likely you will not be able to obtain 45 links at once) is equal to $48, and acquiring a total of 45 links (over an extended period of time) would cost $360. The latter method is considerably less expensive. But remember, we are comparing apples and oranges (purchased one-way links vs. “earned” reciprocal links) here. Therefore, there is no easy way to make a good quantifiable comparison.
• Pros: These are one-way links that are supposedly more valuable than reciprocal links. Also, you don’t have to spend nearly as much time and effort in buying links as required with reciprocal link trading. Because one-way links are more valuable, a smaller # will get you equivalent value to a larger # of reciprocal links.
• Cons: Can get very expensive. In my opinion, link buying is more ideal for companies with large budgets. Also, Google definitely does not like the idea of buying link popularity. Therefore, buying links is perhaps not a solid long term strategy, it will be just a matter of time before google constructs an algorithm that will devalue purchased links significantly.