Are Paid-Backlinks Worth the $$?

For a lot of webmasters, especially those of you managing larger companies and e-commerce websites, time is everything. Nothing takes more time than building a quality foundation of backlinks for your domain.  We all know its a long process where you must consider link velocity as a factor, the steady improvement of backlinks is vital to long-term success.  This makes it an on-going effort that will absolutely payoff, but takes away a lot of any webmasters time.

To save a lot of time and effort, many webmasters decide to pay for backlinks.

But what factors determine whether “paid” backlinks are worth the money? And, you want to make sure that there will be no negative consequences or future issues with the methods your paying for.

Beneficial “Paid Backlinks” Requirements:

1. # of Out-bound Links- NEVER pay for backlinks that are going to be from a web-page that has more than 50 Out-bound links.. a lot of the paid backlink companies offer cheap link packages that consist of thousands of OBLs on 1 web page, which means that all of the link juice is drained to practically nothing.  This should be the first question you ask the SEO or Link pushing company, you want to receive the most link juice per web-page, so the lower out-bound links the more power your backlink is going to have.
2. Anchor Text – you want options here, I recommend choosing at least 3-5 different anchor text per 100 backlinks, a good strategy is having about 40% of links be your priority keyword(s) and then mixing the last 60% with more natural keyword phrases and such.
3. Relevance – you hear this word all the time in SEO and Google is pushing more and more for this in their algorithm each update.  Make sure to compare your paid link options and stick with sites that can offer some relevance for your niche/business/etc.
4. Context – it is always preferred if you can add your own unique content with your link, this could be a short article or description that is spun.  Spinning helps create hundreds or thousands of unique pieces of content that will help match your backlinks with content that is relevant and can help the search engine spiders give more weight to your links.
5. Page Rank – NEVER pay for backlinks from domains that are below PR2.  It is not worth the money.

Using these factors to rank the different backlink services on the web will really help you eliminate the spam and junk offers.  There is definitely no point in paying for links that are from pages spammed with thousands of other websites that are completely non-relevant to your site.  You’ll receive little to no link power and it will not give you an improvement in your search engine rankings.  I would only recommend using such cheap services for diversifying your link wheels or setting up anchor texts, other than that, these services may actually harm your sites “trust” with Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Hopefully this will help you eliminate the junk and choose the SEO companies that do offer excellent link packages, they are out there but they’ll cost a bit more.  Yet, I feel the cost is often worth it and it is one of the best ways to see quick results in the SERPs, just watch out for SPAM!!