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Understanding the Challenges of the Link Building Game
By Bill Platt (c) 2007

Many webmasters who have been following the discussions about
Google's dislike of paid links have been confused about what
constitutes bad links and good links, in the eyes of the search
engine companies. In this article, I will seek to answer many of
the questions people have on this topic.

There are two kinds of links that you can pay to have made for
you: rented or paid links, and permanent links.

Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented Links

With Rented links, you can generally make your purchase decision
based on the PageRank of a page.

The downside with rented links is that Google has stated that
(http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-adam-lasnik.shtml)
they do not like links that are sold on the basis of PageRank,
and they are trying to create systems to identify links rented
for PageRank, for the purpose of discounting those links. While
they may eventually be able to target and negate links developed
by systems like Text-Link-Ads.com or TextLinkBrokers.com, they
will never be able to completely identify and discount all links
that are sold for the purposes of PageRank .

In the end, I suppose Google is not going to penalize the Source
or Target websites for those links, but they will nullify the
value of the individual links in the Google algorithms. Cutts
suggested and implemented the "rel=nofollow" a while back as a
tool webmasters could use for the purpose of identifying links
for which the webmaster did not want to pass PageRank. The only
thing that Google's algorithm will actually do to links
identified as rented or paid links is that it will treat those
links as "rel=nofollow's". If Google succeeds in their quest,
the webmaster buying the links will be throwing away his or her
money, if they are buying placement on a webpage solely for the
purpose of influencing PageRank.

The Story Of Permanent Links

The second kind of link is the permanent link. Permanent links
come in many formats, and in most cases should generally be
viewed as non-rental links. With rental links, you pay a fee for
placement once a month, quarter or year.

Of course, the Yahoo directory is not viewed as a paid link by
the Google engineers, because although you "pay" to get the
link, Yahoo does not guarantee placement of your link in their
directory. Instead, Yahoo says that we are paying them to
"review our link." This is why Google is not discounting links
from the Yahoo directory. Those Yahoo links are nice to have, but
they still do require a yearly review for commercial websites,
which must be paid for on a yearly basis.

Permanent in all cases is in the eye of the beholder. Permanent
as a rule in the Internet world means that you will not have to
pay another fee later to keep that link on the page, where it
will reside. In the context of links on the Internet, permanent
actually means that the link will live at that location, until
the webmaster who owns the website changes his or her website's
direction OR goes out of business.

In my experience, perhaps 10% of the websites where we get
links placed will go under within one year. Towards the end of
the second year, webmasters will look at their Profit/Loss and
make a determination whether their income level will justify
shooting for a third year of operation. Another 20% will close
their website at the end of the second year run. So, 30% will
drop out of business, within their first two years. Of the
remaining 70%, many of those websites will survive to the fifth
year and beyond. I don't know how long one will be able to count
on a permanent link just yet, but links that I built for myself
in 1999 continue to produce traffic for my websites today, and
those links have sent me continuous traffic for years.

Permanent, One-Way Links

Many permanent one-way links can be acquired on pages that
currently have PageRank on them. In those cases, it may simply be
a matter of your link being added to a list of links already on
someone's web page.

However, any link created through a content development method,
such as pay-per-post or article marketing, will be posted on a
new page on the Internet. All new pages on the Internet begin
life at PageRank Zero. It is like the birth of a baby. The baby
begins small, but grows into a child, then a teen, and finally an
adult. All article pages begin their lives at PageRank Zero, and
most of those new pages will increase in PageRank as they age.
Some web pages will never mature beyond PR1, but others can grow
into pages that are as high as PR6 (at least that is the highest
I have seen an article page to date).

If you trust Matt Cutts of Google, he has indicated that all new
pages begin life at PageRank Zero and in the Supplemental
Results. He also said that Supplementals are not the end of the
(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007)
road. Cutts stated that the only thing required to bring a
web page out of the Supplemental Results is to have that web
page gain PageRank. (For those curious why a page went from
the Primary Results to Supplemental Results, the answer is that
either Google began counting links differently OR the links that
gave a web page PageRank no longer exist.)

Three Reasons Why Article Marketing Helps Link Building

My conclusion from this information, and I might be biased, is
that the use of article marketing for link building is a positive
in the Google algorithms.

* I conclude this because links developed through article
marketing begin on pages that have a PR Zero. So, we are
obviously not getting links placed on websites for the sole
purpose of acquiring PageRank, not directly anyway. We are
placing links for the sake of having links, but with good luck,
many of those links will gain PageRank over the long haul.

* By the very nature of article marketing, we can ensure that
the links we develop for our websites reside on web pages that
are tightly focused and targeted to the content of our websites.

* Most websites that post articles do so through a process of
moderation, meaning that all article placements have been human
reviewed. That human review process at the other end of the
transaction puts most article websites on par with Yahoo's
human-reviewed directory.

When we can get our keywords embedded into the link pointing to
our websites, then that is always a much better deal. But, that
outcome will be affected by the webmaster at the other end of the
process. Each webmaster has his or her own rules for article
placement, and some of those folks simply do not permit embedded
keywords in our links, either in the body of the article or in
the about the author information. A plain text link is better
than no link at all, although we always strive to get embedded
keywords in our links.

Final Thoughts

When you write a great article people will link to it, no matter
where it may reside. So in time, the pages that house your
article will gain PageRank.

As the article's author, you are in total control of the
relevance of the web page linking to your website.

Just as you are in control of relevance, you are also in control
of whether people will choose to reprint your article. Write a
good article, and people will use it.
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Bill Platt has been involved in article marketing since 1999,
and he introduced his link building service in 2004. Bill
employs article marketing in his link building efforts, and he
guarantees embedded keywords in his links. He says, "Our link
building service is not for everyone. Our service is more for
the person looking for a permanent, long-term solution for
their search marketing efforts." Bill can be reached by phone
at 405-780-7745, Mon-Fri, from 9am-6pm. Learn more:
http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com
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