Link Brokers

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What are link brokers?

Link brokers are websites that promote the buying and selling of text links. Technically speaking, text links are leased for a monthly fee, not bought. Link brokers make money by taking a cut of the leasing fee.

Should I buy text links via link brokers?

That depends. Link brokers offer a number of benefits, including:

• a large selection of websites
• websites sortable by various variables
• relevant site information available at a glance
• only having to deal with the link broker, as opposed to several website owners
• fixed prices - no negotiating skills required

Of course, there are downsides too, including:

• some useful site information, such as traffic and pageviews, may not available at a glance
• higher prices than you might pay if you purchased a link directly from a website
• you can't negotiate prices - they are fixed
• search engines "may" penalize sites that purchase links from sites within the network

You have to weigh up the pros and cons and decide for yourself whether you feel link brokers are a good place to buy text links. If you have limited time, or don't wish to go through all the trouble of finding sites and negotiating lower fees, then I think purchasing links via link brokers is a good idea.

The one real downside could be that search engines "may" put a penalty on sites, or outbound links from sites, within the network, thereby reducing the link popularity or PageRank benefit. Obviously, you still get the benefit of any traffic generated from the links.

Is it better to buy text links that are displayed on one page (usually the homepage) or across an entire site?

That's a good question! Generally, the more backlinks the better so it makes sense to buy links that would be displayed on every page of a site, especially if it only costs a bit more than a single homepage link. However, this could be a waste of time, never mind money. Why? Let me explain.

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote for page B, by page A, as stated in the PageRank guide. But this is an unnatural occurrence. No one would naturally "vote" for a page hundreds of times. So if Google finds hundreds (even thousands) of links from one source, it "could", and probably does, consider those links as an attempt to inflate the site's link popularity numbers, and as a result remove the PageRank benefits of all the links from the source.

If you check the link popularity of some websites that have obviously purchased a text link on a website as it appears on hundreds, even thousands, of pages, you'll probably notice that Google seems to index only a small percentage of all the links. Yahoo! Search and Microsoft's Bing Search on the other hand seem to index a far greater number of such links, as illustrated in this backlink screenshot.

As such, you may be better off simply buying one link, typically on the homepage, rather than run of site. I certainly think so.

Is Text Link Ads a reputable link broker?

Yes. Text Link Ads are one of the most reputable text link brokers around, with clients ranging from Fortune 500 firms to individual website owners. They offer thousands of text links for sale from hundreds of websites, starting from just $2 per month. Text Link Ads is a member of the Better Business Bureau and also a circle member of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization). I have heard nothing but good comments about Text Link Ads.

Site Map:

• Text Link Guide - homepage
• Text Links - search engines, link traffic
• Anchor Text - variations, misspellings
• Image Links - image maps, alt text
• PageRank - increase PageRank, attribute
• Link Popularity - authority pages, link quality, quantity, relevancy, reputation
• Sitemaps - XML, Google, generators, Yahoo!
• Linkbait
• Link Seeding - link spam
• Link Exchange - bad neighborhoods, link exchange software
• Sponsored Links - PageRank
• Affiliate Links
• Link Brokers - RON, ROS, Text Link Ads
• Natural Linking - artificial linking, link triangles, www or non-www
• Broken Links - link rot, broken link testing