My Travels on the Net

A link can be worth £100 ($139) or it can be worth 1p (1¢).

I came across the following question on LinkedIn today and thought it perfectly illustrated the question “What is a link worth?”

Here’s the question:

I'm doing some work with a client who has used a linkbuilding service to help with their SEO in the past but at £100 per month it wasn't exactly cheap! Can anyone recommend someone they've used for this service who delivers results but doesn't charge silly fees?

Here’s My Answer:

Depending on the types of links this service gets, £100 can be a great deal or a waste of money.

One link can be worth £100 if your most desirable key phrase is in the anchor text and the link is on a blog or website your target market reads with a page rank of 4 or more. This kind of link can both help your rankings for the key phrase in the anchor text AND get real live human visitors interested in your product to your website. Win! Win!

On the other hand, 100 links to the URL in totally obscure directories is a waste of money because they won't help rankings at all and won't get in front of anyone. Lose! Lose! (Except if you own the directory.)

So, The question should be “What links did they get you?”

If this service gets even one high quality link a month, it’s worth it. Links on websites and blogs with a high page rank that include your anchor text and can be expected to drive traffic require a lot of research and leg work to get. They don’t happen on accident.

If the link service gives you a list of 10 directories you’ve never heard of that they submitted the site to this month, you might as well use those pound notes to wipe your arse!

Labels: backlinks, linking

I have spent hours in recent weeks trying to answer this question. So far I’ve come across three reasons why Google under-reports backlinks:

1. Google only gives credit for what they consider to be high quality links. An example of a high quality link when a website links to an article or product description on your website because it has relevant information.


2. Google only gives credit to web pages with a page rank of 4 or higher. I would take this claim with a grain of salt because ther is sooo much mis-information about page rank out there. To learn more about what page rank is and how to use it, read this post about page rank on the High Rankings forum by Scottie Claiborne.


3. Google Deliberately under-reports backlinks. Read the post “Why Don’t My Links Show Up in Google?”

Labels: backlinks, google, page rank