I have been fortunate (and unfortunate) to try many of the mainstream link building services, in order to see which ones are effective. I have been fortunate in the sense that after trying the majority of services, I know that most of them cost more than they benefit you. I have been unfortunate because I have spent considerable amount of money on them and have received minimal benefit whatsoever.
Let me start by saying that this article by no means condemns other link building services out there. I am simply writing this so as to provide you with valuable information which might help you lower your SEO expenses and provide you with more benefits.
That being said, let us jump into the gist of the article.
The first kind of link building services that I have purchased are the ones which put up links directly on high PR pages (and not websites). Some pages go up to PR 9! Although, in theory such services would provide you tremendous link juice benefits, the main problem is their pricing.
One link from a high PR page might cost up to $800! Yes, you read that right. A common PR 6 link costs around $250.
But that in itself is not a problem. After all, you would totally pay a large sum if the benefits you receive are more than the cost, right?
That is where these services cause a problem. Such services do not tell the customer that the pages where the links are put up contain as many as 300 outbound links! This means that the benefit you recieve is minimal but the cost you incur is huge.
A tech savvy internet marketer would see this major flaw and question it, but most of the beginners do not know this and spend money like no tomorrow, hoping to see their websites ranking number 1 on Google. It never happens.
The other kind of service which I have seen is the exact opposite of the one mentioned above. This service uses links from article directories in order to boost your link popularity. For $100, you can get 10,000 links pointing to your website! Sounds like a great deal…
Until you find out that the directories where the links come from are PR 0 or PR 1. Also, the page where the link resides is not PR 0 or 1, most of the times the page’s PR is NA, which either means that the page is very new, or that there are minimal number of links pointing to it.
What does it mean for the user? It means that even if you get 10,000 links to your website, you do not benefit much… A PR 5 link from a good page can provide you more benefit that 10,000 of these links.
So before you start paying for link building services, always check and ask questions on different aspects of the setup. You will almost always find that they cost you more than they benefit you.