SEO Link Building in Depth – Finding Links

As we've seen sometimes paying for links is not the same as buying links and in fact there are many companies looking for your business, companies that want to help you get links. Some of those companies will help you get links in a way that the search engines dislike while others use more legitimate methods. Companies that provide services related to real link building not just selling links. And of course many companies used both approved and non approved methods. So in this article we're going to look at the subject to finding companies to help you create links in various ways. In fact you run into companies that have a whole menu of options from which you can choose. 

Let's start with one of the very worst forms of link, blog comments. You can't be easily find services that will go out and place comments in blogs pointing to your site. These are really obnoxious the worst kind of link spam and they probably won't help you anyway as it almost always no follow links. Any company selling a blog comments service is hard to take seriously. You'll also find companies selling forum comments. Forum commenting both can be a viable strategy and not offensive if it's done right but most companies doing this won’t do it right. They'll simply drop garbage post to as many forums as they can relevant or not. 

Of course you'll find companies that will post your site into web directories and I think this is fine and ethical strategy. These days most of the directories hold little value. On the other hand some companies will drop your site in niche directories. Directories related to your business which is more valuable. You will also run into companies that do reciprocal linking contacting websites in your behalf and asking them for links.  This is not likely to be very helpful has reciprocal linking is no longer particularly valuable. 

There are a number of services that will place you links into blogs not into the comments but into the blog posts, blog roles and the list of favourite links. There are essentially two ways this is done. First companies that act as a clearing houses connecting bloggers and site owners with blogger stating how much a link cost in one of their articles, in theory this can be done without upsetting the search engines by making a link a no-follow links. Of course these are generally follow links as no follow links will be defeating the whole purpose. By the way selling links in blog post is not only against Google's guidelines but in many cases in the United States is actually illegal whether you use follow links or no follow. Almost nobody knows these FTC regulations exist, but they do.

Another problem, bloggers sometimes fake their page rank so buyers end up paying more for a link than its really worth. And one final problem, these sites are not hard to find which means it's not hard for the search engines to find them either. The other way to buy blog links is from companies that own dozens maybe hundreds of blogs. There are many of these companies perhaps thousands in particular operating in Asia. There's a little cottage industry of young Indonesians for instance who build blogs then sell links and articles for a one-time fee or in the box blog roles from monthly or annual fee.

Similar to this and often run by the same SEO Manchester companies, are links placed into web sites that appear less bloggy and more like regular sites. Of course blogs merely content management system so blog as a web site and website might be a blog. But before blogging software became popular, companies were building networks of regular websites in which they could place sold links.

Another service you run into is the placement of social networking links often known as social bookmarking. These companies often create hundreds of social networking accounts in which they can then place links or perhaps go out and create profiles on sites that allow account creation and then place links from those profiles back to your site. You may if you dig deep enough run into services that build links on mass sometimes using software such as X Rumour which automatically posts into forums even automatically entering capture codes. System such as this and the various link networks you may run into are a little scary. They can create many thousands of links very quickly and can create a very unnatural looking link profile. They are a prime target of the search engines, there's nothing subtle here.

Finally there is out-and-out link selling. Companies that put buyers and sellers together, like the blog services I mentioned, site owners sign up and add their site to the inventory and buyers come in and pick where they want to place links.  The links sellers can be small sites owned by individuals or even major sites owned by for example newspapers. So how do you find these services?  That’s the ironic thing, you search for them.

Search for terms such as buying links buy text links, link building service and so on and you'll soon find plenty of services. You can also find people by searching in the outsourcing web sites such as odesk.com, guru.com and elance.com. Search for link building for instance. You might also want to search for the term link building reviews to find websites that review link services.