Most of the search engines which includes Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing use links to determine the reputation of a website. An analysis of these links partly determines the ranking of a website at Google’s search engine and others. The search engines believe that this link analysis has improved search results drastically because users find sites that have value to them. The quantity and quality of links count towards these rankings, and quality is the most important.
Now as you can expect, there are people out there that want to try and exploit this. Many webmaster and search engine optimization experts buy and sell links that will in turn increase PageRank. You as a website owner should be very concerned with this, as these “experts” disregard the quality of a link, it’s source and what potential impact it may have in the long term. These “black hat” techniques can negatively impact a website’s ranking and worse yet, ban them from search results.
Now what should you as a website owner do? Be careful. If you here your SEO expert telling you that they will get a certain amount of links, find out where. If they do not share this information with you because they want to protect your business interests, I would be skeptical.
Not all paid links are bad, and they do not violate Google’s link policy. Yahoo’s directory is a great link, and is one of the oldest directories and cost a couple hundred dollars for the year. Other paid links that you can look at is association, clubs, forums, blogs, etc that pertain to your business.
Google works extremely hard to devalue links that they deem manipulative to website marketing and are meant to pass PageRank. Even as good as they are in stopping this practice, they keep popping up, so if you see a website trying to pass PageRank you can fill out this form, and hopefully will do their best to utilize this information to change the algorithm to detect these links.
Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and PPC Help.