Pricing a Link

When trying to understand the value of a link a variety of factors can be considered, including:

• PageRank / link equity
• anchor text (if you can influence it to align with your keywords that increases the value significantly)
• link location (inline links are more likely to be trusted than links in the footer of a page near a bunch of other obvious paid links)
• direct traffic the link sends
• site quality & brand exposure
• endorsement value (if any is given)

Risk Tolerance

Some links (bought links on SEO blogs, paid links near pharmacy/porn/gambling links) are almost certain to get your site noticed in the wrong way.

Large brands can get away with being far more aggressive than thin affiliate sites can.

Many people who heavily rent links still have not exhausted other cheap and easy link building strategies they could be using.

The Bottom Line

In some markets you need to own a billion dollar brand, have an old site, or rent links to compete. In other markets link renting may pose an unnecessary risk.

The most important aspect of link renting is the one people rarely talk about - the actual value to your business. To determine that you need to analyze not only the quality of the link, but also

• where you are
• where the competition is
• what is needed to bridge that gap
• any potential risks associated with the link buying

Along those lines, I thought it would be good to compare a couple sites to each other, to demonstrate how widely the value of links can spread.

Rich, Average, Poor

$17,000 Per Link

BankRate recently bought CreditCardGuide.com for $34M and it had about 2,000 inbound links on the day of purchase. BankRate may have overpaid for that site, but Rafael David made at least $17,000 per link to his website!

Think about all the crazy public relations stunts you could pull and make money if you got paid $17,000 per link! You could pay an entire town to tattoo your brand on their foreheads...or maybe do something a bit more tasteful than that. Where links are hard to get and lead value is high you can afford to pay a lot for links.

But BankRate was not just buying links, they were buying traffic and rankings...a set of links that fit the criteria needed to get a lot of organic Google search traffic. If Mr. David would have acquired half as many links he might only have 10% the traffic and his site may have sold at a much smaller multiple. When selling a site your base and your growth rate both feed into the multiple you can sell a site for.

In media stories about buying the site, Thomas R. Evans, BankRate CEO, said they bought the site largely because of its Google rankings:

"As an affiliate of Nationwide Card Services, which we acquired this past December, we have worked with CreditCardGuide and have been able to watch their growth and momentum firsthand," stated Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of Bankrate. "CCG has done a great job of developing its organic traffic and ranks highly in a number of important credit card search terms. Adding more direct, high-quality traffic to our credit card business will grow our revenue and improve the margins in this important category," Mr. Evans added.

Affiliate Rankings: Strong Cashflow or Break Even

Some of my friends have affiliate sites that do anywhere from 0 to 10 leads a day at ~ $30/lead. They rank well enough to get good traffic, then their rankings slip. And they keep bouncing back and forth. Buying just a couple strong links could take a $150/day average earnings and boost it to $300...thus yielding a monthly return of $4,500.

If you are an affiliate selling the same crap that all the other affiliates sells, you will see that most the search traffic goes to the top couple ranked sites. As an example, one of my friends saw their Google ranking go from #3 to #2 for a huge phrase that is most of the site's traffic...and their overall site traffic (and profits) went up 50%. If a company is primarily search driven and is in a high value niche they can see huge returns from just a couple quality links.

When you think about the opportunity cost a site making $150 a day might not be worth running. But every dollar it makes over its baseline is profit that can either be used to reinvest into quicker growth or fund other projects.

$1 Per Link

Some SEO and technology blogs have hundreds of thousands or millions of inbound links. For such authoritative sites the average value of each link might be less than $1.

If the competition has 1 million links and you only have 50,000 you might not get enough traffic for the site to be worth maintaining, especially if it is in a saturated market with limited traffic value.

Example Charts

Across Industries

These values are a bit arbitrary, but this chart does a good job of helping conceptualize how the value of links can change based on your vertical, your business model, and the associated lifetime customer value.

Within Industries

The value of links not only depends on what vertical you are in, but also on how you monetize your website. For instance, a ticket broker can earn more per link than a sports blog can.

Disclaimer: keep in mind that the above charts were more for showing examples of relative values than to offer a formula for specific link prices...every situation, every site, and every link is unique.

Link Marketing Strategy

Survey Your Position (and the Competitive Landscape)

If you don't have any organic links then it is going to be hard to buy your way to the top in competitive markets, especially if competing sites have strong advertising and brand budgets.

The key to understanding link buying is understanding the upside potential and how many links are needed to get there. If you are in a saturated market with limited cashflow and are ranking on page 37 at #362 then should you rent links? Probably not. You would be better off investing into awareness, branding, publicity, and developing organic links first.

If you are in the top couple pages and are in the game then renting a few links could help you achieve an explosive return on investment.

All Advertising Has Some Fat on It

Many links that you buy or rent will be filtered algorithmically and have little to no SEO value. But if they help you achieve a positive return on average within an acceptable risk profile then the purchase is worth it. That is how I always viewed directory links. Before Google whacked them I used to submit to about 100 of them. Maybe only 40 or 50 counted, but in aggregate the ROI was still there. Now I may only submit to a half dozen or dozen directories, but in aggregate the ROI is there.

Do you have a brand? If not, your site is part of a "cesspool." In AdAge Google's CEO Eric Schmidt explains the AdWords quality score and organic ranking algorithms in laymans terms:

The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

The key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are less likely to be policed if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company's affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not.

Simply put, big brands should spam. Smart people like you, who read the algorithms as a profession, already knew this, but a large segment of publishers think search is mostly trickery and voodoo.

Build a brand and buy links. If your brand is big enough you most likely will not get policed out of the search results. It has been that way for years. If only the AdWords support team or Matt Cutts spoke with Mr. Schmidt's level of clarity!

I started a blog on search engines in 2002.

In those days, the idea of blogging about anything other than politics, or blogging, or what your cat had for breakfast, was new. In fact, the idea of blogs was new. Most people's reaction to the word blog was "huh"?

I quickly built up an audience, and links, mostly because I had first mover advantage, and I threw in a few social media basics. It certainly wasn't rocket science. But, at the time, I was doing something unique and "remarkable", in the Seth Godin sense of the word.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different.

There are thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of blogs on search, and most of those go unread. A blog on search is no longer remarkable.

Unless you have first-class insider information, and can produce it on a regular basis, I wouldn't advise anyone start a generalist search engine blog these days. The low hanging fruit is gone, but there are still easy pickings in other areas, it's simply a matter of finding them, identifying your strengths, and exploiting them.

How Many Blogs Are Out There?

This years "State Of The Blogsphere" report indicates there are around 133 million blogs, and they are only the blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002.

Even if we assume that half of those are spam blogs, or cobweb blogs, that's still a lot of "personal journals". Are there 133 million readers?

ComScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
Total internet audience 188.9 million
eMarketer (May 2008)
94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
Universal McCann (March 2008)
184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
77% of active Internet users read blogs

Would a generalist blog do well in such a market? It could, but it's highly unlikely. Such deep markets tend to favor a niche approach.

So, instead of a blog on search, one strategy might be simply to go deep on one aspect of that market. How about a blog on the mathematics of search engine algorithms? Or search marketing for a specific region? Or search marketing in one industry vertical, such as travel?

How To Find And Test A Niche

First up, read these posts:

• Market Research Using Google Adwords
• Innovator, Imitator or Idiot
• Targeting Niche Markets

Once you've decided on a niche, you can further test the validity of your idea, and your approach, by asking questions.

One formalized way of doing this is called a SWOT analysis. It's a high-brow marketing term, but the idea is simple in practice. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Make a list:

• Strengths - why do I do well?
• Weaknesses - What do I do poorly?
• Opportunities - What upcoming trends fit with my strengths? What am I doing now that could be leveraged?
• Threats - What internal problems do I face? What external problems do I face?

You then detail how you can use each strength, how you can improve each weakness, how you exploit each opportunity, and how you mitigate each risk.

Simply going through such exercises can open a world of possibilities. It is important to write it down. I find the simple act of writing something down seems to make an idea less abstract and more concrete.

One of the big threats in the blog world is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can start a blog within minutes.

Ask yourself how will you stay ahead of the person who starts in the next hour? The ten people who have started by tomorrow? The hundreds of people who have started by next week, not to mention the big, established names who already have a dedicated share of an audience that isn't really growing.

Tough call. There are no easy answers to such a question, as it really depends on your individual strengths and weaknesses, which is why asking questions like these can provide valuable insight.

Philip Kotler, a renowned marketing guru, suggests asking the following questions of any new business plan or idea:

• Does this strategy contain exciting new opportunities?
• Is the plan clear at defining a target market?
• Will the customer in each target market see our offering as superior?
• Do the strategies see, coherent? Are the right tools being used?
• What is the probability that the plan will achieve its stated objectives?
• What would you eliminate from the plan if you only had 80% of your budget?
• What would you add to the plan if you only had 120% of your budget?

Those last two might seem a little odd in this context, but they certainly are applicable. What would you do if you had more of a budget to promote your blog? Would you spend it on advertising? If so, where, specifically, would you spend it?

Asking these questions can suggest all manner of options. By pretending you have more of a budget, you might identify great advertising partners, but because, in reality, you might not have this budget, you could instead suggest you write guest articles for them, and thus achieve much the same result.

SEO For Blogs

The latest shift in SEO, as Aaron details in Social Interaction & Advertising Are The Modern Day Search Engine Submission & Link Building, is towards relationship marketing, which is why SEOs are increasingly adopting marketing and PR strategies in order to operate more effectively.

Let's face it - SEO for blogs is a cakewalk. Blog software, such as Wordpress, is already search friendly, right out of the box. If you want to tweak it further, there are a wealth of available tools and instruction. Anyone can do it, and that's a problem.

But it's not really about the tools. It's how you use them. The key part to success in doing SEO on blogs is the way you interact.

Specific Strategies To Consider

Quote And Link To Popular Bloggers

Apart from the obvious potential that a blogger will follow inbound links back to their source (you!), meme aggregators, such as Techmeme and Google Blog News, are becoming more prevalent.

These sites aggregate similar conversations together. Simply by talking about what others are talking about, and adding to the conversation, you might get a link and/or attention.

Leave Valuable Useful Comments On Popular Related Blogs

Go where the crowd already is.

For example, I follow most comments in these blog posts back to the authors, and if they have left a site name, I check it out.

Most are then added to my RSS feed reader.

Write Articles For Other Popular Blogs

Think of this as advertising. Advertising costs, and in this case, that cost is your time. The benefits of contributing editorial can be fantastic, however, as you can reach a large, established market quickly.

Create Community Based Ideas, Ask For Feedback Before Launching

This is cheap and cheerful market research. You also give your audience an opportunity for buy-in on the outcome. If the audience feels they are part of the process, they are more likely to accept it, and even promote it.

Add Value To Ideas So People Reference You When Talking About Them

Besides the obvious link benefit involved, it is also great for your brand. Your name becomes your brand, and the more people mention your name, the further your brand spreads. Seth Godin is a master at this, and if you aren't reading his blog already, you should be.

See! It just happened. Twice, in this post, in fact.

Actively Solicit Comments And Reply To Them

One over-looked value of comments is that people are providing crawlable, unique content. Usually I find the more contentious the post, the more comments you receive. So don't be afraid to stir the hornets nest every one in a while ;)

Encouraging Contribution From Others And Highlighting Their Contribution Builds Community

The best situation is win-win. Are you giving your readers and community members a chance to do so?

This is one of the reasons I think black hole SEO is short-sighted, especially for community sites and blogs. It doesn't allow others to win, too.

Network Offline At Industry Trade Shows

I once worked with a guy who had been a very successful investment banker on Wall Street. He says he ignores the University qualifications and information in the public domain, as the real business world works on inside information and who you know. There's no doubt that the best place to get insider search information, and great contacts, is in the bars between conferences.

Every community has an epicenter - a group of people who most others take a lead from - and that epicenter might be as small as three or four highly influential people. Those are the people you need to talk to.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Controversy

If you gain mindshare and authority, some people will hate you for it.

This is related to my "stir-the-hornets-nest" point above. Once you start getting attention, you also become a target. You have little choice but to go with the flow, and keep in mind you cannot please all the people, all the time. Sometimes, it even pays not to please them. People are more likely to engage if they feel passionate, and especially if they passionately believe you are wrong!

Reminds me of a great quote by Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about!"

Further Reading

• The Blogger's Guide to SEO
• How To Do SEO for Blogs, Members Area
• Wordpress SEO, Yoast
• 30 Tips for Marketing Your Blog, Toprank
• Blog Marketing Strategies (and How to Measure Them), Clickz
• Blogs and self promotion, Seth Godin
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin

There was a time when people bought from those people who knew them.

You went to the local butcher or baker, and he knew your name, and your kids names. Personal interaction was a valuable sales and marketing tool.

We can apply this strategy to the web, too.

Interaction Marketing

Interaction marketing, as the name suggests, is about the marketing benefit that can be had from engaging with a visitor in a more personalized way.

It works well in an environment of anonymous, mee-too sameness, because people still crave uniqueness and personal attention. This startegy isn't limited to commerce, either. It applies to all kinds of sites, including blogs.

What Are The Benefits Of Encouraging Interaction?

Encouraging interaction can result in more repeat visits, more sales, more loyalty, and more attention. In many cases, it's quite a simple thing to do, and the pay-offs can be enormous.

A well-known example is: "Do you want fries with that?". McDonald's upsell is an example of interaction marketing. They're asking the right question at just the right time, and they're personalizing the service. And it works, to the tune of billions in extra revenue per year.

The Blogs Squeaky Wheel

One of the problems with blogs, this one included, is that the audience isn't just one audience. There are many audiences.

Some people are experienced SEOs and have been reading here for a long time. Others might have only just learned what the phrase SEO means. Most people are spread across the continuum.

How do you deliver an experience that works well for everyone?

Distinguish Between New And Returning Visitors

Seth Godin advocates distinguishing between new and returning visitors to your site, and targeting them with slightly different messages.

For example, new commentors could be delivered to a special welcome page, informing them about various, important areas of your site. You wouldn't necessarily want to do this for long-time users of the site, because it would slow them down, and might be seen as condesending rather than helpful.

One opportunity that's underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It's more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.

Here is a Wordpress plugin that will do just that: Wordpress Commentor PlugIn.

By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words "If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!" After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location."

You could also try this one: Comment Redirect PlugIn

Another way to achieve the same thing is to send an email to new commentors upon registration, outlining the top posts and welcoming them.

You're customizing the experience only slightly, but the payoffs in terms of relationship building could be considerable. The user are more likely to perceive the interaction as helpful and personalized.

Ask For A Link In The Order Confirmation E-mail

That is certainly one of those "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" moments.

You could ask customers, or new sign ups, to link to you. Your customers are prime candidates to approach for links, because they are already familiar with you, presumably like you, and the relationship has already been established.

Amazon-Style Feedback Reminder

Amazon, and their partners, ask for a review a few days after you buy something.

Not only is this a great way to get feedback, customers may also provide you with content. Make it easy for them to do so.

Selective Advertising

Advertising can annoy visitors, and compromise your brand. You can give people added value by removing advertising for those who join up.

Similarly, you could leave advertising off new content. Create a different template, that includes ads, for your archived content. By doing so, you can monetarize most of your content without annoying your regular readers.

Further Reading

• Conditional Advertising Module - how marketers can use conditional advertising to increase their revenues.

This old chestnut.

There is a post over at Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan entitled "Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker". To cut a long story short, some guy tries to broker a link deal with Danny, seemingly not knowing who Danny is, and Danny plays him along. Danny reports him to the Google spam team.

For the sake of furthering discussion, I'll play devils advocate :)

Regardless of anyone's views on link buying, it is wrong to mislead people. Danny clearly felt this guy was being misleading, and gave him a number of chances to clarify his position. But is buying and selling links really as "risky" a behavior as is being made out?

It might be considered a risky behavior if you spend a lot of time obsessing about Google, as SEOs tend to do. However, links are the glue that binds the web. Link buying and selling started long before Google existed. It will always happen.

It's called advertising.

But it would be disingenuous not to see what Danny is really talking about here. He's talking about buying links for the sole purpose of gaining link juice. I can understand why Google takes a dim view of this practice. . Paid links compromises Google's business model.

Fair enough. If I worked for Google, I'd take the same stance.

For Danny Sullivan, given the level of exposure of his site in the search world, the risks presented by link trading would be significant. Regardless of Danny's personal opinion on such practices, such a deal would clearly be a non-starter. The link seller is a fool for, above all else, failing to identify his customer.

However, for most sites, the reality is that the risk of link buying and selling is probably negligible.

Google taking out the occasional site amidst a storm of publicity doesn't mean much when there are tens of thousands of sites that clearly do not receive the exact same treatment. If one site in two got hammered, it would be a different story, but it is likely the figures run into one site in thousands. It then becomes a matter of weighing one's chances of being detected and punished by Google against the potential rewards on offer.

For example, there are credible, Fortune 500 companies engaged in buying and selling links. The risk of big names being taken out for any longer than a day or two is near zero. If you run the sort of big name site searchers expect to see in the results, Google probably aren't going to leave you out on a technicality. This would compromise their business model, because Google must deliver relevant results.

Is it up to the link seller to outline all the potential risks involved? Apart from the comical farce of a link seller failing to identify Danny Sullivan, how big a moral crime has the guy really committed? Do Google outline all the risks associated with using their products and services? Or is Danny cunningly implying that Google's algorithm cannot determine which links are paid, and in fact relies on people filing reports? ;)

A moral tone runs through such discussions, and I'm not sure it is entirely consistent.

Google are a business and their pronouncements must be considered in this context. They will act in their own interest, and those interest may or may not align with your own. Are we at risk of ceding the assumption of moral superiority to Google when they may not deserve it? Google, like you, are trying to earn a crust, and any organization may not be entirely transparent and morally consistent in all they do. Who do you call out, and who gets a free pass?

Google certainly holds the power, and if being in the SERPs matters a lot to you, then you should stay within Google's guidelines. It's also fair to say that, these days, even this approach offers no guarantees.

Tread wisely :)

Further Reading

• How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer
• An Unjust Fear Of Link Buying
• Why Big Brands Should Spam Search Engines