presell pages

Don't buy links, buy presell pages

Marketing Fan — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:39:01 +0100

Buying links is one tool used by SEOs for years… in fact some people claim that links are 99% of the game … but there are some “news” found by renowed industry experts…

Today I came across a post by Rand Fishkin who seems to have found out that you can see the sites to buy links on an Text-Link-Ads (only due to their image snapshot, not due having trusted advertiser privileges, those see all the urls anyway) while you do not see the inventory at Text link brokers (unless you got the trusted advertiser flag set)

Hmmm – so if I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on TLA and see all the sites’ urls and I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on text link brokers, then I see all the sites URL as well – what’s the difference? Congrats Rand on finding that out.

Well, it’s much better than those jerks from AdvertiseU that send out their spam to all domain registrar emails selling links on their “entreprenour.com” PR8 domain and other publicly announced and SPAMMED domains.

Long story short – Text link brokers claim to be the only text link sellers who do not disclose the inventory to buyers … they even got a claim on their site saying “No other broker or text link seller goes through such lengths to protect it’s inventory” ... well – for simple text link sellers like LinkWorth and TextLinkAds that might be true, but not so for presell pages… so if you are into buying presell pages then definately the statement above is wrong… PresellPageMan is even forbidding to link back to the broker per terms&conditions or you will lose your presell page… and there doesn’t seem to be a thing like a “trusted advertiser” flag at presellpageman.com – nobody sees the sites.

The whole SEOmoz post looks like it’s made up just to promote the new partnership and discredit Text-Link-Ads … I mean the promotion could be done anyway… but probably nobody would care if Rand would post – hey, SEOMOZ got a new parter – text link brokers pay for our servers… I don’t like that type of hidden ads.

Anyway, who the hell is still buying links alone anyway ? I mean you need single naked text links in your mix – but definately that’s only a fraction of the advertising media you need to work with…

DON’T BUY LINKS alone, if the are simple footer links, cluttered together with other low-quality links

BUY PRESELL PAGES and get multiple links WITHIN the content of a page linking to you … the trust of the domain that this presell page is hosted on will help your site and the links to you

My ramble to answer James question is pretty clear:

myself on Rands post wrote:

The whole discussion if disclosed inventory hurts or not is actually just as side-aspect in my opinion. If you read up around 1,5 years back in my blog I spoke about the “VIPS” technology and got similar stuff confirmed by a google engineer at the Google Dance 2005 – they have the technology to LOOK at the page and anyone who believes that Google DOES NOT understand that a bunch of low quality cluttered links in the footer or the nav bar help the same way as links from withing the page content is simply damn wrong.

I’m refering to this post on confirmed block level analysis by Google or the MSN research paper on block level analysis for example

myself on Rands post wrote:

Whenever you want a test the effect of presell pages vs. text links, go out buy a normal “text link” and a presell page on say rather similar strong sites…

Maybe take two 5 year old sites, both PR5 and place a) a homepage link b) a presell page with deep links to you linked by a homepage link …

And you can do that test for a long-tail phrase, not “health insurance” or “bad credit” or “buy viagra” – I mean something reasonable to be changed after 3 months… then wait at least 3 months, unless your own site is super-old

Then judge on the results… the aspect of having an additional entrypoints for your site in the SERPS actually helps you even more and having multiple sites ranking pages to send you traffic certainly helps – those are LEAD GEN pages par excellence… they PRE SELL the client… hence the name presell page

Conclusion:

if you believe that naked links are better because they are not disclosed it’s just half of the story

if you are only buying naked links and never engaged in presell pages, then you are definately missing out on great opportunities for SEOing your site

Indirect linking - Truncated Page Rank and getting rid of link buying penalties

Marketing Fan — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:11:42 +0100

I figured over the last weeks, that some partners or clients are not aware of the great possbility of natural link building "the other way round" ... getting a presell page and then boosting that page with a few links to get the effect of those links indirectly to their own site… that’s why I call this concept indirect linking

The mindset "I need more PR" was born when every direct link to a site contributed to it’s direct pagerank and even better, it’s direct ranking – that was somewhere in 2001 or so. Well – those days are gone ... the search engine engineers know that buying links is mainstream, and have two strategies to fight that kind of link popularity manipulation – a) say that buying links is bad (you bad bad boy paying somebody money for linking to you… ) and b) and more effective – discount the value of direct links...

There is a concept that was documented as "truncated page rank" in the paper "Using Rank Propagation and Probabilistic Counting for Link-Based Spam Detection" which I also had on my TO-READ list of TOP SEO resarch papers since back in July (you should really bookmark that page and check back often :-)

What you read there is of course by no means a confirmation what Google or others implemented, but it gives you an idea of how they work – and I like their conclusions on how to filter "link spam" with the method of applying a heavy damping factor to the direct links.

It is based on the assumption that people that pay money for links, only direct it to their own sites… (that was a crazy though in 2002 – why pay that guy just to link to me … "oh my god, they pay me 5 bucks for a link on my blog – but today it’s common thinking)

[...]where is a damping factor between 0 and 1, typically 0.85.

A page participating in a link farm can gain a high Page-

Rank score because it has many in-links, this is, supporters

that are topologically "close" to the target node. Intuitively,

a way of demoting those pages could be to consider a damp-

ing function that ignores the direct contribution of the

first levels of links,

[...]

This function penalizes pages that obtain a large share

of their PageRank from the first few levels of links; we call

the corresponding functional ranking the Truncated Page-

Rank of a page. This is similar to PageRank, except that

the supporters that are too "close" to a target node, do not

contribute towards its ranking.

So while the first level links are discounted, the second and third level links are not, or at least not to that extend. And the reason is simpe as that

Why should I pay for a link to a site that is NOT mine?

Please note that I’m not saying that direct links (be they bought or leased) dont work… they work just over time, at a discounted strength – and IMHO we are already used to link damping over time for 2 years now… But still, getting strong links to (old) pages that link to you help both – the page you link to AND your own site!

So here’s my advice to get the most out of your presell page (AKA hosted marketign page):

once you get a pre sell page on an authority site, be it an old .edu site or another old and trusted domain, don’t let it there alone – include it in your link building plan
yes, that means linking to a site that might not be owned by you.. so what? you pay people to link to let those links help you!
chances are VERY GOOD that this presell page will RANK. and even OUTRANK your own site! good – you will get traffic AND link juice from that page
so you will increase your traffic from both – indirect traffic from human visitors from the presell page and your own rankings from the links of that high ranking page of course

Talking about the thing called "reputation management" – that’s a similar concept… buy pages on old sites that talk good about you or your company and let them rank ... voila’ that means your reputation on a typical Google search will increase :-) ...

oh – and did I mention your chance of getting traffic increases by 30-100% by having a second entry in the search results?

Now THAT is an incentive, eh?

Note: this post was also sent out end of August to my client-only newsletter … if you are interested in getting such stuff earlier, you might consider becoming a client, too.