Make Money Online – Link Selling
I recently received a request from an SEO agency asking to buy links from one of the sites I operate. They told me that they had found my site (not this one) through the search engines. That site was one of my newer sites, only 3 months old, set up according to “The Keyword Academy” guidelines to make money online.
Of course, I felt flattered. After all, this meant that I had done a good enough job that someone could find that website. On the other hand, I also felt a certain amount of trepidation. I had not created that particular website to sell links (my intended monetization model was completely different), and I was not completely certain how to proceed.
However, the contact person from the SEO agency was polite and professional, so I decided to ask for more information. Apparently, what they wanted were in-content anchor text backlinks.
What is an in-content anchor text backlink?
A backlink is actually a reference from one website to another website. It would look like this, www.bing.com, or like this, Yahoo Mail. An anchor text backlink is similar, except that it contains keywords that people would use when they search for information on Google, etc. An anchor text backlink looks like Make Money Online, or Passive Income, etc.
Most webmasters and bloggers are probably already familiar with the concept of a link exchange or blogroll exchange. These forms of link exchanges basically make use of plain old backlinks or anchor text backlinks. They appear in the blogroll (of blogs) or in link exchange pages, footers or sidebars of normal html websites.
In-content anchor text backlinks are a little bit different. They appear inside a blog post or an article in a html website. Sort of like how “internet marketing“, “make money online with SEO” or “SEO” appear in this post.
They passed me both their desired anchor text and their target website. I could easily fit the anchor text they wanted into one of the articles on my site, so that was not a problem. Their target website also looked fine. It was an e-commerce website and it looked perfectly legitimate. While I still had some uncertainty about link selling, I thought I understood the risks of link selling well enough and continued the negotiations.
The risks of link selling
Search engines like Google and Bing frown on webmasters selling links. This is because the number of links that a website receives is used as an indicator of its importance when people search Google/Bing for a particular keyword. They have been known to punish small webmasters whom they believe to sell links, regardless of whether or not the accusation is true.
The problems of link selling
- You need to keep track of when the link expires so that you can remove it (or re-contact the SEO agency to ask if they want to pay for a renewal).
- You need to take the risk that the search engines know that the website is a link-buyer, and may punish everyone who links to that website. This punishment could range from having the value of all their outbound links discounted to having the link-seller’s website de-indexed. That means your precious website could stop producing income for you.
In the end, the sum they offered me was a far cry from what I had hoped to get. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic, perhaps not. Sorely disappointed, I was tempted to reject it outright. However, I decide to sleep on it instead. When I had calmed down somewhat, I decided to post my experience on a webmaster forum on which I was a member to ask for the thoughts and advice of my peers. Unfortunately, there were not many replies (only one), and he basically said that I’ll need to use my own judgment, but link selling when the SEO directly contacted me is relatively low risk and he had safely done it before.
I am still far from certain whether or not to accept the offer of the SEO agency. Had they offered me $300 for their link to remain for 6 months on my website, I would probably have accepted it without question. But it was far less than that. Anyway, rather than waste all my effort, I have decided to share the spreadsheet template I created to keep track of link sales. After all, who knows if you may get a call (or e-mail) from out of nowhere asking to buy links from your website. It is just one more way to make money online.
Spreadsheet templates to keep track of your link sales. In Firefox, just right click on the link and click “Save Link As”. In Internet Explorer, just right click on the link and click “Save Target As”.