A potential client approached us today for a large link building campaign and wanted to know what every client does:

1. How many links will $x a month get me?
2. How do you build one way links without buying them?

We work with a lot of really smart business people who like many really smart people figure if they don’t know how to do something then it isn’t possible. Or worse yet are hearing from the seo snake oil sales people that they can get 25,000 links for $29! Their traffic is down, their indexed pages are plummeting but still they want reassurances of how many links will they recieve for $x a month.

Unless you are buying links or submitting sites to a lot of not so high quality directories there isn’t a way for a white hat seo link builder to say we can get you x number of links for $x a month. When working in a similar industry we can provide a guesstimate based on past performance but there are so many variables that go into building relevant, quality links that often the most valuable links are the hardest to obtain but one quality link is worth so much more than 25,000 junk links….which if someone is getting you hundreds or thousands of links for just a few bucks you can be sure those links are junk.

As far as buying links, we stopped buying links for clients as part of an seo strategy back in 2007 with the smackdown on paid links and selling page rank. In case you missed it Google actively starting seeking reports of buying/selling link activity.

From Google’s Matt Cutts (head of Google’s spam team):

Update, May 12th, 2007: I finally got some time to circle back around to this subject. I wanted to add an example or two of the sorts of reports that we’d be interested in getting, and try to answer a few questions about paid links. Let’s start with some questions.

Q: Can you give me some more background on how Google views paid links?
A: Absolutely. Start with this post from 2005. It’s a pretty good review of our policies at the time (e.g. link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.). You can also read about panels at search conferences where we did a site review and how much paid links stood out in a site review. I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. Here’s a post from January, for example, where I said:

Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

So this post shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s inline with our previous discussion of paid links. Some people wanted a way to report potential paid links and that was the main reason for this post.

Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

you can read the rest of this post here

There are many, many ways to build one way links, we don’t usually disclose our methods until we sign a contract as part of what our clients pay for is our ability to come up with creative ideas and solutions not because we are necessarily brilliant but because we’ve spent years online in the search marketing space and through a lot of hard work have come up with creative, legitimate solutions that keep us one step ahead of our competitors and at the top of the SERPs.

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