You made a great site. You filled it up with some great content and informative pages. You spent a lot on the design of the site too – it looks attractive and professional. Everything seems to be fine however you are not satisfied.

The reason of your dissatisfaction is that you are getting few visitors and you are not doing good business. You did some research to find out why the search engines especially Google is not sending traffic to your site. Then someone told you that your site is not ranked well with the search engines and that’s probably because not many websites are linking to your site.

So to increase link popularity you started sending emails to website owners in the hope that if they give a link to your site, you will link to their site in return. It didn’t work out as reciprocal link exchange has lost its importance.

In frustration you have decided to buy links.

Well be warned, Google discourages webmasters to buy links from other sites just to increase link popularity.

NOTE: It does not mean that Google hates paid links. If you are buying paid links to advertise your site in some other site to get traffic, its perfectly ok. However if Google robots come to know that a link is paid link to increase link popularity or page rank of a site, the site may get banned altogether.

Why Google hate paid links?

Google, as you must have known by now, gives a lot of importance to inbound links to a website. If a website has a lot of good websites linking to it, the site will get good ranks in the search results.

However this theory is based on the fact that webmasters link to other websites if they feel that the website offers some good value to their site visitors.

This link is out of interest and offers value to their visitors. But a paid link may not offer any value to the visitor of a site, further may influence the search engine results.

Google can tolerate anything but spam. This way of linking is considered spam by major search engines and therefore should be avoided.

If you are thinking how on earth Google will know if a link is paid or not, then here is some more information for you.

Google has three ways to detect if a link is paid or not.

1. Software: Google software that crawls the web. It has unique and complex algorithm that decides if a link is paid or not.

2. Manual checking: Google has appointed spam check officers that keep checking the web for any paid links (and any other form of spamming the search results.)

3. Third Party Reporting: If someone finds a paid link they can directly report it to Google. Here is an article on how to report paid links.

So be very cautious if you want to buy links to increase link popularity of your site. You may well regret your decision.

However if you want to buy links to advertise your site, there is no problem and you may go ahead. But there are some ethical ways to do it, so that the search engine knows that it’s a paid link to advertise and not to spam the results.

Read my post on how to buy links to make sure the search engines understand they are paid links and therefore should not be considered while raking websites and giving page rank (PR).

NOTE: If you want to get great links to your site (not paid), read my post on how to get great incoming links.

Your views are important to me. Please do leave a comment.

Related Topics:
 
1. Is Reciprocal Link Exchange important
2. How to Find Inbound Links in Google and Yahoo

A lot of people I met who wanted to learn SEO asked me this question – how to find inbound link to a site? Therefore I thought I should write an article on this.

First thing first – what are inbound links?

For website A.com, the total of all links from other websites that link to A.com will constitute inbound link for A.com. Got it? Let me explain it in a simpler way:

Say B.com and C.com, both link to A.com, then A.com has 2 inbound links. But B.com is linked only from C.com, so B.com has 1 inbound link. I hope now the picture is clear.

Why webmasters give so much importance to inbound links is because of the well known fact in the SEO world that more the inbound links to a site, better is its rankings.

Inbound links is also known as backlinks, incoming links, inlinks, and inward links.

How to check inbound links using Google search engine?

Go to Google.com.

in the search box type:

link:www.sitename.com

[Where www.sitename.com is the domain name of the site you want to find incoming links for.]

And press enter.

You will see that Google will show

”Results 1 – 10 of about **** linking to www.sitename.com”

Note that there should be NO SPACE between “link” and “:” and “www.sitename.com”, else you may get incorrect result.

Example: Let’s find out how many inbound links Google.com has.

Go to Google.com.

in the search box type:

link:www.google.com

And press enter.

You may also click in the following link:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=link:www.google.com

You will see that Google will show

”Results 1 – 10 of about 330,000 linking to www.google.com”

It means Google.com has 330,000 inbound links.

[Result as on September 5, 2008. Your result may vary.]

NOTE: Google has a Google Webmaster Tools which can be found here. If you register with Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many inbounds links your site has.

To this first register with http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Then register your site.

Then go to

Dashboard > Links > Pages with external links

Google Webmaster tools will show which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.

You can find more information here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

How to find inbound links using Yahoo search engine?

There are two ways to do it.

First one is exactly same as Google’s.

Go to Yahoo.com.

in the search box type:

link:www.sitename.com

And press enter.

You will see that Yahoo will show

”Inlinks 1 – 100 of about ****”

Example: Let’s find out how many inbound links Google.com has in Yahoo search.

Open Yahoo

In the search box type:

link:www.google.com

And press enter.

You will see that Yahoo will show

”Inlinks 1 – 100 of about 265,611,772”

It means according to Yahoo, Google.com has 265,611,772 links. You may be thinking why it is different than Google’s results. Its because both the search engines have different algorithms to calculate inbound links, so the results vary. For example Yahoo may count an inbound link from a small new site, but Google may not. (This is just an example to help you understand why the difference and therefore should not be taken seriously. Search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret.)

Another and easy way to find inbound links using Yahoo search engine is this:

Go to Yahoo Site Explorer

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

In the Yahoo site explorer search box type the domain name and click on the “Explore URL” button or just press enter.

Note that in Yahoo Site Explorer there is NO need to write “link:”, just type the full URL of the site you want to find the inlinks for.

For example to find incoming links for Google.com just type http://www.google.com in the Yahoo Site Explorer search box and press enter.

Yahoo will show all the pages indexed by Yahoo and inbound links for that site.

Hope you found this article interesting. Please help me to improve this blog. Your suggestions matter to me a lot. Please leave a comment.

Related topics:

1. How to Get Great Incoming Links
2. Is Reciprocal Link Exchange important?

This article will deal with the importance of reciprocal link exchange – whether it’s important or not.

You must have read a lot about link exchange. This is what you have read – keep exchanging links with high PR (page rank) site, as they will help you to get top ranking in the search engines.

Well its great if you can reciprocate links with high PR site or better still can get an incoming link from them, but you don’t need rocket science to know they wont link to your site if your site itself has a low PR.

Of course if you have a high PR site, webmasters will beg you to exchange links with their site. You choose.

But how many have a high PR site?

Let’s come back to the topic of the site – is reciprocal link exchange important?

Short answer is NO! Long answer is incoming links to your site ARE important.

Why reciprocal linking is loosing its value?

Search engines have systems in place to know the importance of an outgoing link. If they think the link is given solely for the purpose of “link exchange” they do not give it any importance.

There are ways to find this:

1. Too many outgoing links in a page.

2. Irrelevant linking. For example – a site selling mobile phones linking to a site offering information on Dinosaurs found in South Africa centuries ago.

3. Site A linking to site B, and site B linking to site A. In most cases both the links will be neglected by the search engines.

4. Links coming from FFA (free for all) pages.

5. Overall quality of the webpage / website.

I am sure there are many other ways to find if a link is really important or not.

So what should you do? Should you really go for reciprocal linking or spend time building a quality website? My experience says the latter pays in the long run.

It takes a lot of time asking webmasters to link to your site, keeping an eye on who has linked and who has not, and removing links of those websites who have removed the links to your site.

Believe me, its very time consuming. Instead concentrate on building a great website. Write good content. Let your site be of good value to your visitors. If they will find your site good, they will come back again and again.

Good quality incoming links are good, as they are valued by the search engines, but spending time to get incoming links is something I disapprove of.

If you make a good website full of great content or tools then people will link to your site. Concentrate on creating a quality website, and don’t worry about other things – they will fall in place automatically.

Update: I have written an article on how to get great incoming links for your site. I hope you will find it helpful.