16 January 2012
Choosing the right link company partner can be a minefield. Here are some considerations that should be made.

The best thing I’ve subscribed to in the last couple of years is SEOMoz. It’s a brilliant tool that tells you all sorts of things like errors in your website, optimisation suggestions for specific pages, link comparisons with competitor websites and rankings.

One of the things I’ve learned is just how competitive some websites are when it comes to links. They can have thousands, or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands more links than their competitors. For years now I’ve been doing all the link campaigns myself, but this kind of knowledge has led me to investigate specialist link companies. Keeping up with the Joneses is seemingly becoming a full time job in itself!

The thing is, there is an incredible range of quality variation between different link companies. So here is my own list of things to look out for:

Where are the links placed?

Are the links placed on their own websites?

If so, would they remove the links if you stopped using their services?

Are the websites based on the same IP address?

Are the links placed on link farms? If so, avoid like the plague

Are they concerned with natural links?

If you suddenly start to have lots of increased links – might that look suspicious?

Do they spread the links out to have a natural ‘bell curve’ shape (more medium quality links, fewer low and high quality links)