Should I buy a site-wide link from a PR8 site?

[David E]

I have recently been offered a site-wide text link from a website with a PageRank of 8/10 at a very resonable price, I have been reading up about it and there seems to be mixed views about site-wide text links. My experience of them is that they work a charm. Here's an example about 18 months ago I used to work at this company called Iomart and I sold mini optimised websites with a generic domain name and sometimes they worked alright on MSN and Yahoo but never on Google and they never got a pagerank of above 2/10, I clocked on that the sites needed links to work and I said to one of my customers to place a link to your mini site from your main site, his main site had a pagerank of 5/10 on many of the pages, he placed a site-wide link to the mini-site from his main site and withinn a month or two the mini-site had a google pagerank of 5/10, the mini-site did incredible in MSN and Yahoo and pretty good in Google, far better then any of the other mini sites I had sold. I have read about a few people saying that site-wide links will actually harm your rankings, is this correct? I have quite a few site-wide links already and my rankings are staedily increasing on all search engines, should I by this PageRank 8/10 site wide text link?

[Andrey Markin]

I think sitewide inbound links can hurt you only in Google. And only if you have little or no trust. To earn trust you should have links from trusted sites, like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory etc.
So if your site has other quality inbound links, then buy it...

[gabs]

Hi david..

The amount of text links you have pointing to your website directly effects your positions on the search engines, the links we set up are one way so they seriously boost your rankings

This is a quote from the site in your sig and imho the amount isn't as important as the quality.. (even in msn) Google seem to pick quality/trust side of thing far far better than yahoo / msn but this is just imho!

[catanich]

If you want to get penalized by Google, buy links. A small site or new site that get a "PR8" is a red flag. It doesn’t happen. Just don't do it.

If you focus on 5 to 10 PR 5 sites and a group of PR 4 sites, you will be better of that a PR8.

If I enter the following url http://www.catanich.com/ here, is this a link? Yes. But does this page have any PR? No. Then what good is this link? This page has not even been indexed by Google.

A PR 8 site that has you link on a PR 0 page has no value. Even if the link is on the PR 8 page, verify that the link does not have the "ref=nofollow" attribute in it. If it does, the PR does not get passed.

If it is on a PR 6 page of the site, make sure that it can be indexed by the SE from the home page. If the navigation is broken, flash or javascript, the SE will not see the navigation link and the page your link is on will not be indexed.

Consider this scenario: the link is on the PR8 page, navigation is perfect, everything is ok. It looks great. Right? Wrong, they are using cloaking so the links are not seen by the SEs.

You bought a PR 8 link that will never be credited to your site. And it will take you 6 months to find this out.

Hope this will help you. There are good link partners out there if you are a good on.

Jim Catanich
Catanich Internet Marketing Dallas Texas (http://www.catanich.com/)

[Zhoog]

may I ask what amount of money they were asking for that sitewide PR8 link?

[kevingibbons]

I agree with catanich, you'll have to look into many factors to make sure the value of link is passed on. Maybe try doing a link: search on Yahoo Site Explorer for current links on the site to see if this is listed.

Also agree with gabs about the quality and relevancy of links being far more important than quantity.

[sem4u]

In one of the industries that I follow most of the sites in the Google top 10 have a sitewide link from a PR8 industry news site. However, these are older sites which had a PR5 or above before buying the sitewide link. These links cost $850 a month. I expect the traffic from them is very on-target though.

[KingArthur]

I'd better have one backlink from PR 8 page that lot of backlinks from sitewide where the PR is small.

However, there is one exception - if this site is very relevant and your backlink will attract the eye of potential visitors, then it's wise. But not because of PR, because of traffic.

[catanich]

The question is should someone buy a link. There is never a good reason to buy a link. Only someone who is trying to "beat the system" or take a short cut will do this.

Remember, a good link partner is someone who has a link to my site that Google reports. This usually takes 6 months.

To be part of a client's link campaigns, you will be tested over time by site managers like me to find out if you are a "good link partner". If you don't play the SEO games, then you get access to our client base that has PR 8, 7, 6, and 5.

Or as I do with great success, invest in a new PR-0 site, help them with proper internal linking and help them get indexed by Google. Within 6 months, over 60% of these have received a PR 4 or above. Out of mine have come 4 - PR 7 sites. I helped them get started and now the quality of their site(s) is helping me.

If you want access to the high PR sites, stop playing the short cut, SEO games. After 7 years, we have seen most of them and / or used them without success.

Or, if you want to be a good link partner that has a real site and want to invest some time in doing thing right, contact me.

Jim Catanich
Catanich Internet Marketing Dallas Texas (http://www.catanich.com/)

[ChrisWebPub]

Buying links has existed longer than Google, you cannot then say that the practice is only spam and only for manipulating search results. It is just another form of advertising, and there is nothing wrong with advertising your site.

Likewise, you will not get banned or penalized from a link to you. It won't happen, google has specifically said it won't happen.

What may happen is not a penalty but a devaluation. 1000 links from 1 site will not be as helpful as 1 link from 1000 sites, but 1000 links from 1 site is more helpful than 10 links from 1 site. Get it? So a sitewide link is going to be better than a one-off link, but don't expect the same benefit as you'd get from the same number of links from a diverse number of sites.

As for whether you should do it or not, that is going to depend on the link positioning, and the topic of the site.

Is the site off topic with a bunch of already bought links in the footer so you'll be sandwiched between "Viagra" and "cheap insurance". Or is it an on topic site, with no existing bought links, and will give your link a less spammy looking appearance?

If it is the latter, I would buy it, the former, never.

[Zhoog]

If you're paying $ 850 I believe you should get a decent amount of visitors from that site alone and not just do it for the PR increase. If that is what you want (don't get me wrong your PR will increase), indeed, try to get Contextual Links.
And not just some link between crapy off-topic sites.

[debram]

David E - you wrote the original question/post in October of 2006 - did you buy the link? And if you did, have you seen anything from it?

[gabs]

And is it still a pr8 ?

[debram]

Is the site off topic with a bunch of already bought links in the footer so you'll be sandwiched between "Viagra" and "cheap insurance". Or is it an on topic site, with no existing bought links, and will give your link a less spammy looking appearance?

Chris offers some very good advice here IMO!!

Although I will say that anyone who agrees to put their link between a v iagra and cheap insurance link probably doesn't care how it looks! :eek: :D

I think what Chris alluded to when he said "topic of the site" is an important point when buying site wides. If you find a site with a strong ranking presence and hosts the same sales demographic you stand a much better chance of benefiting both from a rank and conversion standpoint.

If you have endless pockets then it doesn't really matter but if you don't, looking for sites with good link pop AND people potential is best.

:smile:

[David E]

I never bought the link, the site is still PR8 and it is on-topic and it get's big traffic, stuff it here is the URL www.andybudd.com, he offered my the link for £100 per month, it has 6,000 pages though and I wouldn't want to effect the rankings of my site, I recently did a link trade which got me 5,000+ links all at once using the phrase search engine optimisation, I dropped 50 places on Google for the phrase, 30th-80th in less then two weeks, I do not usually go for these sort of things but this guy said you link to my site and I will stick you on a high traffic PR7 site, I thought bargain and went for it then I saw my site drop 50 places for the phrase search engine optimisation, whoever said off-page SEO can't have a negative effect on your rankings was full of it, I have removed the link to this guy's site and told him to drop the link.

[ChrisWebPub]

There are hundreds of reasons why a site can drop. You cannot arbitrarily assign causation like that. Such behavior starts most incorrect SEO theories.

You said it was a link trade as well, those usually involve on page things like adding links to the person you're trading with. If this exchange did hurt you it wasn't the incoming links you gained, but the 5000 outgoing links you added.

[David E]

I only added one link to this guy's site and in return he stuck me on this newspaper site which got me 5,000+ backlinks, it had to have been something to do with this little deal, I think the site he put me onto might have been flagged for selling links. The site I linked to was on-topic and not a bad neighborhood.

[torpengkute]

Site wide link are the same as one way Link...