This is a work in progress and is not quite ready to use at this writing. However, I did want to let you know that I’m working on on the project and that all newsletter subscribers will be able to use the system and get one or two free one way links for as many domains as desired. If you are already subscribed to my newsletter [OWL] you don’t need to do anything — I’ll announce when the service is ready to use.

If you are not yet subscribed to the newsletter, you can do so right here and you will get in on the free linking fun as soon as it is is ready.

The first thing you need to do is learn a little about link building yourself before you go shopping. You don’t need to be a link building expert, but you need to understand how the process works to be an informed buyer. You can learn what you need to know right here on this site. You may want to read these posts if you are not already familiar with these topics:

• How to get Links to Your Website
  
• Seven Keys to SEO Link Building Success
  
• Why One Way Backlinks?

You should now have a pretty good understanding of the kinds of linking and the benefits of one way links to your site. Let’s start by listing some of the things you should avoid in link building services.

FFA Sites and Link Farms – These don’t work, at least not long term and participating in them can actually harm your website rankings. FFA is short for “free for all” and are sites with thousands and thousands of links with no real content. Link farms are similar and the search engines may penalize your rankings if you have a lot of links from these types of sites.

Comment Spam – Posting relevant comments on blogs is a valid link building tactic, but posting junk comments just to get links is useless. Unfortunately, there are  services out there that use comment spam as their primary strategy.

Reciprocal Links – There is noting wrong with recipricol links, but if you get nothing but recipricol (or two way links) you are not getting a lot of milage out of your links. Two way links help a little but you really need one way links to get good search engine rankings. Some link building services concentrate only in getting two way links and if those are used they should be only part of your
link strategy.

Buying Links – Google hates sites that sell links and sites that buy them. If you buy links, especially high page rank links you risk the wrath og Google.  Even beyond the risk of being punished by Google buying links is by nature a very short term tactic. When you buy links you are paying for them every month and as the bills add up as some point you are going to want to stop paying for them. When you stop paying you abruptly lose the links.

We have covered what to avoid when looking for link building services. In the next article we will take a looks at the positive aspects and what you really want to get out of this kind of service.

First let’s take a look at the goals that would prompt someone to buy text links.

Boosting Page Rank

Whether there is a real advantage to a high page rank is another question for another post. However, regardless of the answer, people still strive to get a higher Google page rank. People often buy high page rank links with this as their primary goal.

Getting Indexed Quickly

Some web site owners buy high page rank links for a short period of time just to get a new site indexed.

Improving Search Engine Ranking

The search engines place a high weight on how many and what kind of links point to your pages. Webmasters looking for a fast and easy way to get better rankings often buy text links. The best effect is obtained when they buy contextual links instead of buying links that are in a list on the sidebar.

Getting More Direct Traffic

Advertising is actually a form of link buying with the motivation of getting traffic from the ad itself instead of for the SEO effects of the link.

With each of the above goals there are risks. Google does not like paid links and they have been known to slap those who buy links. if you buy high page rank links and don’t have a lot of natural high page rank links you may get Google slapped. Google usually slaps you by stripping their page rank. However, they may also totally de-index your site.

If you just buy a few links for getting indexed quickly or improving your ranking and don’t appear to be trying to manipulate your page rank you are probably pretty safe.

Even if Google doesn’t penalize your site when you buy one way links there is another big disadvantage …

It is pretty expensive to buy links and most site owners can’t afford to pay month after month. When they stop paying the links disappear. If the paid links were a significant portion of the total links that can be bad news.

I have personally decided to not buy links, but I do use some services that allow me to place my own links within posts on a number of blogs. With these services your links don’t vanish if you decide to drop your membership. These services are much more affordable than buying links and much less risky for the webmaster.

Of the one way link services I have used, there are only two that I maintain a membership with and recommend to others. The more lower cost service is 1waylinks and it is worth the investment for anyone that wants to increase search engine rankings.

I’ll clue you in in another post on the other service which is considerably more expensive but worth it if you have a lot of sites to promote and are already making money.

Both of these services can get you to the front pages of the search results and you don’t need to buy one way links and take on the expense and risks that comes when you buy links.