Can you buy links
and get value for money ?

Continuing from the first part of this article, we still want to know if we buy links from a website whether they're value for money.

You need to read " buying text links and getting value for money" which is the 1st part of this article before continuing. This part of the article will make less sense if you don't read the 1st part.

If we now look at the alexa ranking for each site we can also see that Site B is likely to be getting more traffic than Site A or Site C. Using a relative value for the alexa ranking normalized to that for Site C. Then Site A could have 1.32 times the traffic of Site C and Site B could have 3.1 times the traffic of Site C.

Of course the amount of relative traffic these three sites actually get could be quite different from the results reported by Alexa. The Alexa statistics only come from those site visitors that have the Alexa Toolbar installed in their browser.

In order to estimate the number of visitors each of these websites actually gets based on their alexa ranking I have compared them with data correlated from my own websites. Based on visitor statistics and alexa rankings across a number of my own websites I have produced an estimate for the number of visitors the alexa rank represents.

An alexa ranking of 250,000 is estimated to represent 112 visitors per day.

                                       Site A    Site B    Site C
Estimated Visitors/day:     136        320       103

In order to estimate the number of visitors that each of these sites is likely to send with a text link we must assume a particular CTR or Click Through Rate. It would be tempting to say that because Site B and C are only offering 10 Ad Placements compared with Site A's 25 Ads that one could expect a better CTR from Sites B and C.

However there are too many other factors involved to be able to make this assumption. Factors like position of the Ad on the page, the design of the Ad, how related the page content is to the Ad and the visual design of the page (busy or less complex). I have therefore assumed a CTR of 0.5% for all 3 sites.

The number of estimated visitors from each site that would
click on the Ad text link and go to our site is therefore:

                                        Site A     Site B     Site C
CTR visitors/month:           21          49          16

Using the cost of Ad placement on each site, the cost per visitor to our site is:

                                        Site A     Site B     Site C
Calculated Cost/visitor:    $2.38      $0.92     $3.12

Depending on the level of competition for our visitor one would have to consider whether Pay Per Click might represent better value.

If the conversion rate (CR) of Visitors to Sales on our site was 2% then we would make 1 sale for every 50 visitors who came from the Ad on the other site. This means the cost of one sale is therefore:

                                        Site A Sale     Site B Sale     Site C Sale
Calculated Cost of Sale:      $119               $46                $156

Formulae used:
Monthly Visitors to site from a text link = [1,000,000/alexa rank] x 28 x CTR x 30.4
Cost per visitor to a site from a text link = Monthly Link Cost / Monthly Visitors
Cost of Sale from Text Link to a site = Cost per Visitor / CR

There are quite a number of websites from which you can buy links to improve search engine ranking by gaining a higher page rank. However the practice is frowned upon by Google and other search engines and has led to a degree of secrecy about sites from which you can buy links. Google has threatened to ban such sites when it finds them.

There seems to be a very fine line between link brokers from which you can buy links from other websites and those like linkworth who sell advertising space on other websites, through the use of image ads or text links.

One such website that has positioned itself as selling advertising space on other websites and against buying links for PR gain is Linksmile. Wesley Tomas in his article
" what are you thinking? don't buy page rank ! " sets out the case to not buy links just for page rank.

Buy Links Conclusion
It's clear that when it comes to the decision to buy text links from another website that the page rank of the linking site is not the all important factor one might have thought.

It has been shown that to buy links from an actual website with a PR 4 could provide better link value than from a site with a PR of 6.

The case to buy links to increase a sites page rank
does seem to have questionable value.

In my scenario of 3 websites from which you can actually buy text links, the cost of gaining just 1 extra page rank point could range from $1,900/month from PR 6 sites to $630/month from PR 4 sites.

The value of buy links from a website in terms of traffic they would bring
based on alexa ranking, is more important than page rank.

In my 3 website scenario the website with a PR 4 had a better alexa rank than the site with a PR 6. These were not theoretical sites but exist in reality.

The cost per visitor that resulted from text links varied from just over $3 to just under $1. Although the cheapest cost per visitor came from the PR 4 site, this had nothing to do with the monthly charge to buy links, which was almost identical for each website.

The cost to buy links either for page rank or traffic means that without careful consideration of all the factors involved one could quickly be out of pocket unless selling higher priced products with a high profit margin.

Making Your Website Better for You