Why Buying Blogroll Links is Stupid
A new service that allows bloggers to sell links in their blogrolls has arrived today. It might have arrived a while ago but John Chow mentioned it today so it suddenly has the attention of the blogosphere.
There are several problems with buying blogrolls links, the first is the fact it is incredibly shortsighted. If you have to buy your way onto somebodys blogroll doesn’t that say something about the quality of your site? Perhaps investing the time into creating a site that can get blogroll links on it’s own merit would be a better idea.
Also if you are thinking that commercial sites can hide their links away in blogrolls and not get caught then you don’t give Google enough credit. It is quite easy to see that a link in a blogroll with any anchor text other than the name of the website is unnatural. In fact if I was Google I would devalue the anchor text of all blogroll links and just count the PageRank of the link anyway.
Finally do you really want to have your blog publicly listed as a link seller?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 7 comments below, or add your own!
I think the age of paid links is slowly fading for some industries. Somehow, I find it more natural and profitable to hire a linkbaiter and get you those links naturally.
Block-level page analysis will kill off the ‘traditional’ areas used for selling links, such as blogrolls, sidebars and footers. It’s not hard for Google to see that those areas of a webpage offer little value to them.
This is probably the reason Google has been so aggressive towards paid posts, where the links are embedded in the main body text block. It makes discounting them that much harder.
Despite putting my blogroll at the bottom of the page, my blogroll buddies received some nice traffic from mine.
Strange huh?
I prefer to buy links, even if google not pay enough attention to paid links it must give us traffic from a relevant page to your website.
If i am selling i will prefer to buy links from a page with content related to hosting, and even if i get one customer every month i will get my investment back…may get profit too…
Thereighening thing is our closes competitor main seo technique is to buy blogroll links.. and he is at position 2 or better of all our main keywords….. what to do !?
blogroll will defo become undervalued like blog commenting but for now it works great.
I don’t think it is stupid at all. Some of my previous sites have done well in the search engine rankings and I believe blogroll links help. If you have a content site or blog, it makes more sense to develop relationships and unique content. However, for some, like eCommerce sites, they are already a leg down from the competition. It is difficult to rank eCommerce sits and I think Blogroll links help. Of course, not many people are able to convince webmasters to link to their eCommerce site without some sort of kickback.