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1. Understanding The Challenges Of
The Link Building Game

2. 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.

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

4. Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented
Links

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

6. The downside with rented links is that Google has stated
that 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
or TextLinkBrokers, they will never be able to completely
identify and discount all links that are sold for the
purposes of PageRank .

7. 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.

8. The Story Of Permanent Links

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. In my experience, perhaps 10% of the website's 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.

13. Permanent, One-Way Links

14. 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.

15. 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).

16. 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 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.)

17. Three Reasons Why Article Marketing Helps Link Building

18. 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.

19. * 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.

20. * 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.

21. * 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.

22. 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.

23. Final Thoughts

24. 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.

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

26. 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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