All of you probably know that SEO is all about links and more links. It was confirmed by many SEOs and even Search Engine Spokesmen that Links are the primary ranking factor in Contextual Search Engines.
Since day one SEOs and other consulting firms specialize in Link Trading and Link Buying. It is well known that for good rankings you must have a lot of good links, especially in high competition market niches.
Link Trading or better known as Link Exchange is a very slow process in which you have to contact webmasters in your niche and hope that they will be interested in swapping links with you. Not to mention that many experienced ones will not trade you if you don’t have strong Google Page Rank, therefore Link Exchange is practically impossible with new sites.
Best way to boost up your rankings and gain some Page Rank is to purchase some links. In order to do so you will have a fair budget and the skills to find cheap high quality links.
There are many ways to find a good link, but the most important one despite the high dispute in the webmaster world is still Google Page Rank.
Google PR can be seen if you install the Google Toolbar and enable PageRank bar (from the toolbar settings). This green bar will become your N:1 friend in your link building campaign.
PageRank is a number from 0 to 10. It is calculated using special algorithm which is not disclosed by Google, but from quick observation you can notice that PR is spread in some sort of Geometrical Progression.
One of the most interesting and important things about Page Rank is the way PR flows between websites and inside internal pages. This is highly speculated area since this is the most secretive algorithm heavily guarded by Search Engine Engineers, but there is some public information on how it works.
Based on the PageRank distribution, the value of the Initial Page (Linking Page) is based on — NOTE: page, not website since websites contain many pages —.
For example:
PR1 = 8 points
PR2 = 64 points
PR3 = 512 points
PR4 = 4096 points
PR5 = 32768 points
PR6 = 262144 points
PR7 = 2097152 points
PR8 = 16777216 points
PR9 = 134217728 points
PR10 = 1073741824 points
(Note that this type of calculation is nowhere near precise!).
It is theorized that each link, including internal links to the same website, are counted with nearly equal value, although recent findings confirm that links found on top half portion of the page are valued slightly more than the ones on the lower portion. I’m pretty much certain that this is Search Engine’s answer to link selling as it tries to discount the value of “un-natural” links in the footer of many websites as they are with the sole purpose of boosting search rankings.
The main goal in link buying and main purpose of this link buying guide is to highlight the importance of Link Juice Calculation. Link Juice is basically the amount of “PR juice” your link will take from each linking page. It is really simple to calculate the number of links on a page and divide the total PR value of that page to that number in order to find the actual “Link Juice Value”. Using this simple formula you will be easily able to estimate which link deal is best for you since no page is equal to another.
In order to make your life even more complicated, Search Engines estimate the value of passed PageRank based on Topical Relevance.
Topical relevance is pretty much the “theme” or “niche” of the website. It is assumed that similar topic link pages are passing more Link Juice than others. It is important to note here that all links pass some sort of value since no search engine can be 100% sure that websites don’t have anything in common (for example same webmaster/owner), but still it is times better if they are in relevant topic or atleast have the link keyword repeated somewhere on that same page in order to show relevant context. Link Cloaking is pretty much a form of art. The goal here is to imitate non-SEO-influenced content as if a real blogger or forum user would pass you organic link. We can see that some SEOs prefer to buy “paragraph” of text with a link inside, rather than going with a single link. I would suggest that if possible.
Another really important thing is called Link Age. It is generally accepted that Links age like fine wine. The older one gets, the more link juice it passes, so don’t be alarmed if you purchased some high PR links and your website did not gain any Page Rank on the next google update. Note that PR gaining is a slow process and you will rarely gain pr 5-6 from a newly developed website.
If you purchase good quality relevant link with decent PR, you should be able to feel increase in Search Engine Position for that page+keyword within week or two. Note that the higher PR one linking page is the faster this process is. As I’ve mentioned previously you may get sudden increase then drop a bit, and then increase to a stable top position within few weeks (as link ages).
My last note is about the Importance of SEO as a constant effort. If you do some SEO and get your desired positions, you must NEVER STOP! If you stop then some competitor will most probably take you down. If you show persistent work your rankings will defeat your competition.
If you follow those few rules, you should be able to boost your website up the search engine rankings.
Where do we start? Check out the Digital Point Forum for great deals on link exchanges and sales.
If you want to share something with us, please comment this post.
