Search Engine Optimization

Outsourcing link building to companies in UK, Europe, US and 3rd world has become a common practice among SEO companies and in house optimization departments. The benefits and savings are obvious. Link building is a tedious, hard process that requires a lot of time and a lot of manpower. Third world can provide that man power for a fraction of a cost of what the western workers would charge. Link building outsourcing not only saves money, it has become a competitive necessity, as all companies that shoot for words like vacations, mortgages, etc are doing it, and the ones with the most budget and the most innovative teams get the top spots.

There are several ways link builders go about doing their business. The first tier, and usually the least effective are the mass submission to directories, which ones pure gold in terms of SEO, but has since lost their power. The second one are one way link building packages, priced from several hundred to few thousand dollars, delivering anywhere from 50 to few hundred links. The links vary, but the saying “you get what you pay for” applies here just as anywhere else. On the lower end link builders will get links from blogs and sites, designed for the sole purposes of link building / link selling, where navigation is cluttered with sites, while the site only consists of articles, which hopefully were not scraped.

On the higher end of link building services pricing is structured on per link basis, usually by page rank. Although SEO’s have long critiqued toolbar page rank as an incorrect way of judging about a website, everybody is doing it, and TBPR is not going away. As Eric Ward said (me paraphrasing) “if you think TBPR doesn’t work, go ahead and uninstall that toolbar… go ahead”.

The pricing on per link basis varies from agency to agency, and does not always reflect quality. There are many variables at play. For instance a UK company might charge $50 bucks per PR4 link, while their indian counterpart may offer $25 for the same PR4 link. What is the difference? The UK company might be simply outsourcing the work and charging a 100% margins to the clients, or they might be offering a better service, and better link building. The indian company may be good at what they do, or they may deliver lousy links from scraped sites. You never know, and the only way to find out is to actually place an order, and then review the work link by link.

Speaking of reviewing the work. If for instance you have a case when you ordered links for several sites in one niche from one company, be careful! If the company knows what they are doing, they’ll get links to those sites from different places, on the other hand they might put links to the same sites from the same places, leaving and easy to follow trail for Google – which calls for penalties, from the long war against the link buys. Make sure there is no trail when you order links from one company, for several sites in the same niche.

Link builders vary in their volumes of work. Some can spit out hundreds of links per month, but not so good quality, while others only a 10 or so, but of high quality.