Many bloggers would quickly whip out their wallets and wouldn’t hesitate to buy a fair priced link on a website with a PR of 9!  Should you follow suit?  There is a lot more to buying and selling PageRank than meets the eye and a lot of interesting information that you should be aware of if you ever consider buying links or taking advantage of your pagerank to sell links. As a follow up to yesterday’s article: Going From PageRank Zero To PageRank Superstar, I’ve decided to discuss more about Google PageRank.

Selling links on your website

• “Do-follow links” - The links that are sold to increase pagerank are referred to as “do-follow” links. Do-follow links signify that the link has a direct impact on the pagerank of the website in which you are linking to.

• If you are selling PageRank: be honest - Nobody wants to get cheated when they are putting up their own cash to buy some PageRank. Never try to scam the buyer. Be upfront about the numbers of links you will sell, the exact page that you will sell them on, and how much you will charge.

Common methods bloggers use to sell links:

• Paid reviews - Paid reviews are a great way to get free links to your website from other, higher rated websites.

• Sidebar text links - Buying links to your website on another blogger’s sidebar is a great way to get your website more exposure and increase your pagerank.

• Links within posts - Linking to other websites within certain posts can be of huge value to others, especially if you’ve written a quality article. To put links to other websites within your posts, you can charge some money.

• Text-Link-Ads - Text-link-ads has a great system running that allows you to sign up as a publisher, advertiser, or both. Once you’ve signed up as a publisher, people can make offers to “buy links” on your website for an assigned period of time. If you sign up as an advertiser, you can buy text-links on other related websites and search to find the best deal. Text-link-ads is a unique service that many bloggers like John Chow use to make money online.

Does a link from a higher PageRank make the link more valuable?

People assume that if a website witha high PageRank links to them, it will be more valuable than other links. Most people think that buying links on high ranked websites will have the biggest impact at boosting their pagerank. There are many misconceptions about PR and a lot of general information you should understand before getting involved and concerned with getting links to your website.

You should ask the following questions before purchasing a link to improve your PageRank:

What page on their website is your incoming link from?

Each individual page on a website has it’s own pagerank. If you receive a link to your website from a page that isn’t the website’s homepage, you could be receiving a much lower ranked link than you thought. You’ve got to know the exact page that will be linking to you before you make a purchase ;)

How many outgoing links are already on the page?

If there are many outgoing links on the pages that link to you, the value of the incoming link is minimized and you will not receive as much of an affect. A high ranking page can definitely transfer PageRank to another page by linking to that page. If you think more about it, getting just one link from a page with a PageRank of 4 may be more valuable towards bulding your PageRank than getting one link from a website with a PR 6 that has a bunch of outgoing links.

How many other links will be included on the page you are buying from?

Always ask how many other links will be include on the page and remember that purchasing links to artificially boost link popularity is against most search engine guidelines. If there are a bunch of other links that will appear on the same page you are linking to, the link won’t be as valuable to you as the buyer.

Where are the links located on the page?

Google only indexes around 1000 words per page. If your link is at the bottom of a lengthy page, it probably won’t even get indexed. If it isn’t indexed, it won’t have any affect on boosting your PR. Try to buy links near the top of the page and make sure they won’t get cut off by googles indexing if they are towards the lower portion.

Where does the seller get (his / her) backlinks?

If the seller has such great PageRank, yet won’t disclose where they get their backlinks from, they could be using shady, blackhat SEO techniques and haven’t been caught yet! If you see a site that gets backlinks from a bunch of (free-for-all-link) pages, doorway pages, guest books, stay away! Seeing this is a sign that the seller will not have his PageRank for too much longer!

More common sense questions to always ask:

Does this website have a good repuatation? - Nobody should buy from a website with a bad reputation. Do some backround research on the website and check up on the site’s reputation!

Do I trust this website and the webmaster? - If you don’t trust the website and the webmaster, skip it and move on. There are plenty of other websites to buy links from.

Do I know anyone else that has purchased links from this site? - Ask around on forums, contact others, ask around as to whether or not others have successfully purchased links on a certain website. Ask them how reliable and truthful the seller was.

Does the deal sound too good to be true? - If you find out that someone is [supposedly] selling links on a PR 9 education website (.edu) for a ridiculously low price, the deal is probably too good to be true. I don’t want you to get sucked in and lose some money for biting a scammer’s trap! Don’t get involved if it sounds too good to be true. How can you tell what a good buying price is? I recommend asking around DigitalPoint Forums and seeing what the community members have to say. Check out what John Cow experienced by taking a gamble by coughing up $50 dollars in hopes of a PR9 link.

Be aware of a glitched or fake PageRank (how your pagerank could be glitched):

If you’ve got a domain name that is redirected to a high PR website before or during the Google PageRank update, the PR assigned to your website is the same as the PR of the redirected domain with a higher PR. When the new PageRank is assigned, it will most likely be the same as the redirected domain. Basically: the rank of your domain will mirror the PageRank of the more popular domain that you redirected to. In turn, your website is going to display a fake PageRank. Whether you are buying or selling links for PageRank, it is important to be aware as to whether or not the PR is glitched. So, how can you tell if the PR is glitched?

• If the site is brand spankin’ new and has a high PR - If the site from which you are buying is relatively new, chances are very good that it hasn’t had enough time on the web to build massive amounts of backlinks and may very well have a glitched PR. Be wary about buying PR from brand new sites: they could sell a bunch of links, shut down the website and keep the money - using some blackhat SEO tactics.
  

• If the site looks low quality and has a high PR - If a website looks low-quality and is selling pagerank, there is probably some shady work being done. Just to be sure that the offer is legit, as the owner some questions about the PR and see how he responds. Never look to drop a big chunk of change at a website that looks low-quality.

• If the PageRank significantly jumped from the last time you saw it - Obviously if a website you were just visiting had a PR of 2 and jumped to a PR of 8 in a short period of time, it probably isn’t legit. Do a little bit more research about the website, ask the owner why he is selling PR, and check if the content on the website is quality. It is much easier for me to trust a website with quality content and a friendly webmaster than one with an antisocial webmaster and not much good content.

• If the owner started selling a large number of links for profit - If you happen to know that a lot of other people have bought links from this certain site and understand that the owner has already sold a ton of links for profit: stop and click the white “X” inside the red box located in the upper right hand corner of your browser. Ask yourself what you were thinking, and move on. If a person is rapidly selling links from a website with what appears to be a high PR, you probably shouldn’t trust it.

• Ask the owner - Not all owners are liars, and if you confront them about their pagerank, they may not even realize that their pagerank is high. The owners that are selling links like crazy for slightly expensive prices are the ones to be aware of.

Why you should be careful of constantly selling PageRank:

You should definitely not get caught up in heavy selling of your PageRank. If google finds out that others are buying paid links on your website, they won’t hesitate to crack down on your site and lower your pagerank. If you want your site to be somewhat competitive in search engines, I don’t recommend heavy selling of links from your website.

What to always keep in mind

Building up your PageRank is a goal of many bloggers and website owners. With that said, there is absolutely no reason to shell out a lot of money to help boost your site’s PR. I’ve always preached that when you create timeless content and develop resources that others find valuable, your PR will naturally increase. Why? Others will be inclined to link to your great articles so they don’t need to do a bunch of extra research!