Link Selling – Dark Shades of Gray

Selling links is getting into a very gray and shady territory, and

by entering that world you can sink yourself very quickly by following black hat tactics!

The world of SEO is a dangerous place most know only a tiny bit about! As the old saying goes, sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You cannot read a few blog posts, mostly understand the basics and then go to work on your website in the manner a professional would. The mistakes that can be made in this situation are both numerous and potentially lethal to the health of your site. This is particularly true in the world of link exchanges. In general, the more relevant inbound links a website has, the better the site ranking will be.

As often happens when people have a less than full understanding of a concept, some people twisted this knowledge by leaving out the all important word ‘relevant.’ While the link-exchange industry has boomed, not all have boomed by the book. Link exchanges are not as simple or straightforward as they appear on the surface. There are many details that must be fulfilled for a link to be of value.

A link is in many ways a nod of approval between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you. You are vouching for that site to be a quality site. Page rank, which is calculated from a complicated algorithm, boils down to the simple concept of high is good. If you spend a lot of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, keep updating frequently, and over time get other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site higher as far as PageRank is concerned. You will probably rank well for SERPs as well assuming you have done your keyword targeting correctly.

What does it take to get high PageRank?

* Make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your own visitors’ experiences. When a visitor follows a link off of your page, they should not land on a bogus website. If a recommendation by your site leads people to trust your opinion, then they will come back to you!
* Be aware if a reciprocal link from this other site will do you any good. Low PageRank sites should only be linked out to in cases of extreme value and relevancy.

Link building is a job that should only be started if you understand the ramifications of it and correctly utilize and understand the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data.

Even if you think you haven’t done anything wrong, you can be accused of link spamming if you are not careful. Watch out for unscrupulous link directories and sites that operate with little or no oversight. Use the techniques outlined above to make sure that you’re posting to relevant sites/directories/ articles/ blogs or wherever you choose to submit your content and links.

Linking software creators claim that you can get thousands of back links with the press of a button or for only “$89″. The only way to get good quality back links is to do the research yourself and hand-submit every single link. Otherwise you are basically torpedoing your own site and the work you put into it. Rather than doing that, use an SEO firm that does the work manually and gives you a list of where your links are coming from and the PR of each site so that you know everything is operating above board.