Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about sites like Million Dollar Home Page, 500words.com, and 1024ads.com where you can buy pixels or keywords on a page.
Personally, I think the entrepreneurial spirit behind these first sites is ingenious – who’d have thought so many people would be willing to pay $100+ for a small space on a website? These people have just made themselves a hefty sum of money in a short period of time.
For the average advertiser, I tend to believe that these sites are a gamble. On one hand, you’re putting down $100 in hopes that the site will become popular and will drive traffic to your website. On the other hand, the chances you’ll get targeted traffic from people looking to buy your services is pretty slim, particularly when you could invest that money in Yahoo Search Marketing or Google Adwords. Most people that browse your site will probably be doing so because they’re curious about the types of sites that bought ads from these sites.
Why Buy A Link? It Might Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
One of the most important things you can do when it comes to search engine marketing is to get high quality links from reputable sites. There are all kinds of theories on how Google uses links to your website to rank your site, but here’s a quick overview.
Google uses the number of incoming links (sites that link to yours) as part of its calculation to determine where your site should show up in search results. Not all sites that link to yours are considered equal, though. Google gives a higher weight to sites that:
- Are relevant to your site (within the same industry or subject matter)
- Have a high PageRank
Google weights sites it considers spam or link farms a low rank and that can actually hurt your site or get it banned from Google’s search results.
People try all sorts of ways to get links to their website, including exchanging reciprocal links with other websites (that may or may not be relevant) and buying links on sites (often with high PageRanks).
A better way to get links is to provide good content on your site that encourages people to link to yours. In this case, you are receiving a one-way link, meaning someone links to you but you don’t link back to them. It is thought that Google considers these types of links more relevant than reciprocal links.
Why Buying a Link May Hurt You In The Future
Right now, being linked to by non-relevant sites seems to work, but Matt Cutts – the guy in charge of eliminating spam at Google – has hinted that in the future, these types of actions may actually harm your site. Matt’s post sparked a heated discussion involving almost 900 comments on his blog, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future.
I’d say the best advice is to try to find sites that are relevant to yours and get links (or advertise) that way rather than game the system by buying ads or keywords on non-relevant or novelty websites. In terms of bang for your buck, it’s best to go where you know your target audience is rather than gamble that a few might stumble onto a random website and eventually find your site.
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