As part of my involvement in the Mozilla project, I am responsible for a page of links to various companies which use some of our software. (You can probably figure out which one I mean, but I won't mention it because last time I did we had a load of fraudulent submissions.) Recently, I got the following email:
Sir,Paid Backlink Request
We are wish to place our PR3 Seo company backlink in This place <url> , We do not use <software>, just want a Permanant backlink from this page. if yes please let me know this charge ? and payment method ?
Without committing to anything, I inquired as to what sort of money was available. After a couple of exchanges, I got this:
My budget Not more than 50$ per PR7,8 link, if yes pm me payment details?
I find that fascinating, and a lot more than I expected. (The page in question currently has a PR of 7.) If one link is worth $50, there is clearly serious money in gaming search engines. My blog has a PR of 7 also. Hmm... ;-)
I did, it goes without saying, turn the offer down.
Posted by gerv at May 20, 2009 5:11 PM | TrackBackpage rank 7 is worth around $100.00 to $150.00 a month depending on back links, do follow and traffic site all over the web buying and selling
Posted by: jamey boje at May 20, 2009 6:09 PMI cant get the window for google off the page after I choose a download like my bank. so I get half the bank and half google. how do I change it.?????
Posted by: john nacco at May 20, 2009 6:14 PMJust add the rel=nofollow attribute to all links listed there. Spam problem solved :)
Posted by: Ian M at May 21, 2009 9:01 AMAnd id software used to in the past - http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=130
Posted by: Ian M at May 21, 2009 9:03 AMIan M: Could do. But it's nice to give a boost to companies who actually are using it. I guess I could add nofollow to those with private copies, or those that I'm suspicious about.
Posted by: Gerv at May 21, 2009 10:36 AMA PR7 link is worth WAY more then $50 but I can guarantee you that if you start selling your PR7 links, Google will penalize your site(s) and you'll lose position in search results and possible your pagerank. :) That being said, Pagerank is pretty much worthless these days. Just because a site is PR7 doesn't mean they get more traffic or better placement in search results. I have plenty of PR0 websites that show up on page 1 and page 2 for various targeted search terms. :)
Posted by: Brian at May 22, 2009 11:29 PMLinkfarming of this nature is a vain and superfluous exercise in futility conducted by people who don't understand how search engines work and, specifically, don't understand that even the simplest relevancy ranking algorithms are specifically designed to pay less attention to link farms and more attention to real sites with real content, seeing as how those are the sites people are interested in finding.
My work email address (small town public library) gets a *constant* stream of requests from various people who want us to link to their sites. As best I can tell, they all figure they're the only ones asking, and that the fact that our site isn't bristling with a billion completely irrelevant links must be totally unrelated to its reasonably good pagerank.
The truth is, of course, that our site ranks like it does precisely because it is focused on providing useful and relevant information to our patrons, rather than on linkfarming. I don't actually know what the PR number is, because I don't care. I do know that for the searches that we care most about, we dominate the entire first page of results on Google, though admittedly one of the search terms involved is not particularly competitive.
Posted by: Jonadab the Unsightly One at May 26, 2009 10:58 AMI know companies that would happily pay over $1,000 a month for a link from that page, given the right anchor text, but it would indeed catch the attention of Matt Cutts and his Google spam team soon enough... This is why people used to sponsor the W3 for $10k a year...
Posted by: Joost De Valk at May 27, 2009 11:30 AMIs this page also have NO-FOLLOW tag?
Posted by: affiliates at June 24, 2009 2:08 PM