Finding Value Of Paid Links?, When is it worth keeping them? Options

[BJ Wright]

There are plenty of paid linking opportunities out there. But how do you value them, when it is worth keeping them up? In my understanding of link building, mostly the value is not in the traffic from that site, but rather the link value that it passes onto your site. So how do you track the value of a link, when you are paying on a monthly basis?

[Black_Knight]

Publicised paid links are only worth maintaining if they actually drive traffic. Just as SEOs may look for paid links that effectively sell PageRank, so does the Google team - and when they find a site that sells PageRank, there's a nice little feature that let's them stop that site being able to pass PR anymore, even though its own PR won't always be penalised.

The ones worth keeping either have an obvious value that isn't in PR terms, or are such private deals that Google couldn't/woudn't suspect there was any reason to discount the link at all. In other words, deals not on the open market and not available to all comers. The kind of sites that say 'No' if asked to display a paid link for anyone they don't know and trust.

[BJ Wright]

Just as SEOs may look for paid links that effectively sell PageRank, so does the Google team

Ammon thanks, I guess I need to continually be reminded of this!

As for now the backlinks are showing within google when i check my site: link:www.mysite.com. Will these eventually disappear? Or will google just discount there value without making anything known?

Thanks,

BJ Wright

[Black_Knight]

It depends how many are being sold or how big the sales network is - the bigger the amount of link manipulation being done by the network, the sooner or higher priority stopping it will be.

Its why you find old timers in SEO talking about 'staying under the radar'. If they don't know where your guerilla forces are, they can't target them. If they can't spot that you've bought links, they can't slap a penalty on them.

Under the radar is a good expression for other reasons too - it reminds you that detection is not just line of sight, and a high up spy-plane with radar has a whole different viewpoint to what you might have expected to be worried about.

Link patterns can be quite distinctive, and sometimes trying to hide a particular pattern means covering it up with something even more noticeable.

Remember, the art of camoflage is the art of making things appear to be natural and expected. Draping your jungle-pattern camoflage nets over your bare-desert base really isn't going to camoflage it at all.

[egain]

Never heard it put better myself

[BJ Wright]

Ammon,

With all this being said, what about directories (Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, LookSmart, etc.) Does google discount these. Or are the considered authority sites, passing link value to my sites? Is it still worth the time to manually submit to as many directories as possible?

Thanks,
BJ

[Black_Knight]

You can't buy a link on Yahoo's directory - you pay for the review, but they can take your money and not list you, so that makes a big difference.