Text Links - Strategy

Site-wide Text Links

We offer single text links on one page in a website. Text link buyers used to prefer site-wide text links, several or dozens of links throughout a site. The Search Engines no longer consider this an effective strategy. Text links on every page in a site appears contrived, rather than natural.

Google may even penalize your site for employing site-wide text links as a ploy to increase your PR.

Anchor Text

Your anchor text (the hyperlinked phrase of your text link) is critical to promoting your site to the Search Engine. If you want to boost your rank in the SERP's for the keywords 'airline tickets', for example, then the words 'airline tickets' must appear in your anchor text. A simple lesson many webmasters overlook when buying text links.

If you purchase 5 text links, you should NOT use the same anchor text on every site. Variation is important. If all the anchor text is the same, that implies you wrote them yourself. Anchor variation for our example 'airline tickets' could be, 'discount airline tickets', 'cheap airline tickets' or 'airline tickets worldwide'.

Link Relevancy

The Search Engines analyze your backlinks to calculate your rank on the SERP's. For ranking purposes, the Search Engines place more weight on incoming links, rather than page content or optimization.

Links from high PR sites will boost your rank. You should also selectively place text links on sites relevant to your page theme. Airline travel sites should seek links from travel-related sites.

Searching for Your Backlinks

Find your backlinks by typing link:http://www.yourURL.com into Google, Yahoo or MSN. Backlinks are updated on a schedule, just like PageRank, every few months. Most backlinks are never shown by the Search Engines...tradesecret. They don't want you to know exactly how they make decisions about ranking sites.

Reciprocal Links

Joining a Link Exchange can be helpful for your PR and SERP rank. Search Engines prefer to see broad link popularity for your site. You should have incoming links from many lower PR sites as well as higher ones.

Reciprocal links alone cannot boost your rankings. This should be part of an overall strategy of securing backlinks.

Buying Text Links and Google

The Search Engines cannot identify that you purchased text links. Be sure your links conform to several guidelines.

First, buy links on unique IP addresses. If a site is part of a network on the same server, you should not place links on more than one site.

Make it a point to vary the anchor text on the sites, which looks more natural.

Stay away from sites that blatantly offer text links for sale on their page. Google can read that too.