What Is Buying Text LinksA text link is a piece of hyperlinked text on a website that sends ‘link juice’ from one website to another. Buying text links on high rank websites gets your website higher ‘link juice’ for search engines like Google and Bing to follow.
Generally this would be keyword text that a business is aiming for (Rolex Watches, Cheap Laptops, Website Design, Holiday Homes etc.) that are competitive keywords on the internet.
Buying text links is supposed to help with SEO, however SEO is a complex and constantly changing form of marketing to improve website ranking on search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Google is the dominant search engine since it is the web browser that is loaded onto most websites and smartphones.
The process involves getting traffic to your website from the main UK search engines:
Each of these search engines use a different formula (known as a website algorithm) to rank all UK websites, which changes throughout the year.
SEO is very much an unknown, since each of the search engines keeps its formula for ranking UK websites a secret. The best guess is that SEO broken down into 2 main areas:
All search engines use complex algorithms to rank all UK websites based on how relevant they think it is to the user’s search query. These algorithms change several times a year as search engines evolve.
The quality of your website content is important, but not everything. The usability of your site and the amount of backlinks your website has from trustworthy sites can all help to increase your site’s visibility and help you rank higher on the search engine results page (SERPS).
The load speed of your website also now is considered as part of the mix.
The hosting of your website is important (which effects page load speed).
Your social presence is another factor that effect where your appear on the web. When social media landed, sites like Facebook were disregarded. In the following years, social media is taken into account big time!
Users who have made a relevant search are more likely to click on your website, interact with your brand and make a purchase. If your website gets people returning, this is also taken into account (news websites for example have returning visitors).
To get onto page 1, on the top 10 results on each of the major search engines.
Generally companies will buy text links from websites that are of higher page rank than theri own in order to tell search engines that their websites are more credible.
Websites that sell text links are normally blogs or marketing forums or (bad news) link farms.
Buying text links is part and parcel of SEO, frowned on by many companies and a risky form of SEO as far as search engines are concerned.
This can give a boost in a websites authority and help a website to climb up the search engines for the chosen keywords.
SEO does take a long time, both in developing the target website, but also the link building that goes alongside as part of the overall SEO process. A quick way to short cut some of the link building process is to buy links.
Directories (such as the Yahoo directory) are not really included. They are a similar concept, as directories will place a business in a specific ‘category’ which show search engines that a website is linked to a certain category.
In buying links to specific kinds of websites, search engines see that a website is associated with specific high page rank websites.
Search engines do not consider text links to be a natural form of organic link building. However search engines do not penalise websites that purchase or sell text links, so this is somewhat of a mystery.
Many of the top companies that are on search results have purchased text links.
Buying text links can be expensive, ranging from £20 per month up to over £1000 per month depending on the page rank of the website selling the links. I.E if the website selling the links has 500,000 visitors a month, they will charge more for text links than one that has 10,000 a month.
Some SEO companies advise that buying too many text links will result in search engines banning or blacklisting a website, so there is the risk this can happen.
If search engines see a website pick up 1 high profile link a day, this is fine, natural and will slip through the nets; however if the search engines see a website pick up 50,000 new links in a day, then alarm bells will ring.
We do advise talking with an SEO company before buying any text links.
Choosing a marketing company to handle your SEO can be a challenge though, as there are so many in the UK to choose from. We want to help you choose the ‘right’ SEO company for your business.
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