Buying links is valid link building strategy and as long as you make them look natural you won't get penalised and your rankings will improve. This short guide will help you to spot the sites that are trying to sell links of no value from a link building perspective and are trying to rip you off.
1. Fake Visual PR
It is very easy to fake PR and very easy to spot.
How PR is faked
It is done by sending the Google spider to another website with a high page rank. This PR is then assigned to the PR fake site during the next update giving it a fake page rank.
How to spot fake PR
If you do this search in info:domain.com and the site returned is not domain.com then the PR is being faked. It is as easy as that. There are also a number of tools that you can use to spot fake PR:
Fake PR Tool - UK Webmaster World (currently not working)
Another Fake PR Tool (External link to:
Check Page Rank!)
But PR is not important
Correct, but these sites will have faked PR because they have few pages indexed, no backlinks and are probably getting no search engine traffic.
These sites are junk and the seller is trying to hide this.
2. Dropped Domain Names
Some webmasters buy domain names that have been 'dropped' because previous owners did not want the domain name any more. These domains usually have some PR and sometimes backlinks based on the previous owners promotion activities.
Be very careful when buying links from sites created from dropped domains, most of the time this sites do not pass on link juice as when the ownership of the site is changed, search engines sort of consider them to be new sites.
Spotting dropped domains
Again this is quite easy to spot, typically the homepage will have some Page Rank but the inner page rank will have none. You can also check the domain whois history on sites such as:
Domain History Check (External link to whoisdomaintools.com)
3. Paying in Advance
Most vendors want you to pay for many months in advance for links as it cuts down on administration. However, sometimes the intention is not good, the vendor is not expecting the site to keep its PR or remain strong in the coming months so the owner may be trying to maximise profit while the going is good. Think carefully before paying 6 months or 12 months in advance for a link.
Its usually advisable to pay monthly or quarterly. However if you have been dealing with the vendor for a long time and you know the quality for his site, paying for 6 months or 1 year in advance may be a good idea as you will get a good discount.
4. Link Type
If you are buying links as part of your link building strategy you want plain html links. You don't want 'nofollow' links, javascript links, or redirects.
Spotting 'nofollow' links
These are quite easy to spot in the HTML code by looking at the link code to see if there is a rel=”nofollow”. To make the task easier get yourself a copy of firefox and install this plugin:
SEO for Firefox Extension: Free Search Engine Optimization Browser Plugin for Firefox (External link to seobook.com)
Once this is installed no follow links are highlighted in red.
Spotting javascript and redirects
When you hover your mouse over the link the link the destination will look like an internal link.
Remember a link with catchy anchor text in a good position on a relevant site with reasonable traffic will still get you well targetted traffic.
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