Link buying is not always necessary. In fact, it’s not even always a good idea. Sometimes it’s just a complete waste of both time and money.

Link buying should not be an automatic reaction to launching a new site. Whether or not you buy links should depend on a number of factors and, like any other part of your online marketing strategy, should be assessed with the pros and cons, costs and benefits being weighed against each other.

IF - Do I need to buy links for this site?

Each new site or soon to be launched/revamped site gets a marketing plan including a link building assessment which states:

  • What does the site already have in terms of inbound links?
  • How much more does it need to meet its listing goals?
  • What sort of link building should we do for it?
  • Can we link to it internally?
  • Do we need to buy links?
  • How many, what type, can we re-use existing suppliers?
  • Budget?

Questions to be considered are:

  • Can we get the same quality (or better) links for free? - One possible method is to do requests for free links and wait to see if there is much positive response.
  • Can we get the same quality (or better) links using the our own sites from reciprocal or triangular link exchanges?
  • Can we provide high quality, relevant links from within our own network?

Once it has been decided that link buying is a necessity, consider:

When and What - Criteria for assessing a particular link buy:

  • Relevance of the site in general and the page in particular
  • Search engine friendliness of site and page we’re buying the link on
  • How well interlinked to the rest of the site is the page we’re buying the link on
  • Page rank of page we are buying link on
  • What else is on that page (links/content)
  • What else is on the site (anything we wouldn’t want to be associated with?)
  • Age of site
  • Inbound links to site (how many, what type, where from)
  • Do it have Dmoz, Yahoo, Wikipedia, .edu or other safe links?
  • What is the traffic as reported by Alexa or the site if they’re handing out such info
  • Price – is it negotiable or can we get more for the same price
  • The duration of the link buy (permanent, monthly, annual) – and is it negotiable
  • The communication quality (polite, professional, hurried, bossy)

Where and How Much - Price, Placement and Duration:

  • Always try to get a discount or longer deal (permanent if possible) or multiple links or links in a better spot.
  • Negotiate on placement, try to be set apart from the other outgoing links. Banners are good – links integrated into page content are best, footer and side links are not ideal.
  • Permanent is best, long term is good. I very rarely enter into deals with a duration of less than a year - this saves on admin and renegotiation time.

Conclusion: Link Building is Hard Work

Successful link buying requires just as much planning, research and analysis as other link building methods. And then on top of it you have to pay! So make sure it’s worth it.

By the way, link buying should be thought of as online ad purchasing. Yes, yes, I know you also want to boost your PR but it is an ad just as much as it’s a link. If you pay for it that makes it advertising, simple. So treat it like an ad and assess the potential ROI - of both money AND TIME - before jumping into it.