When Google thought of Links as a means to judge a site, they would never have imagined the magnitude of link building scams they would have indirectly helped to grow and fool the gullible website owners.
People who have been watching how this link building story has developed, will have seen how text-link-ads.com and textlinkbrokers.com sites and many other sites have been penalized for selling links. (text-link-ads.com has since recovered and page rank is back in place). The rule google seems to be following is that – any link purchased for boosting page rank is not acceptable. So, to the question of how to tell google that a link is a bought link is to include the rel=’nofollow’ tag. So, a directory which includes a rel tag is legit. By including the tag, no link juice is passed on from the directory and so no boost to page rank. However, you still get the traffic. This is surely going to dissuade the text link buyers, as they will not get any link juice but only link traffic.
There are some some directories which still value highly. One example is yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com
A listing in yahoo directory under a category chosen by an editor, may not boost page rank, going by the google rule stated above. But, there may other benefits which in turn could boost page rank. The one benefit which i have observed is the number of pages google crawls and the frequency with which it crawls your website. A listing in yahoo has a beneficial effect.
Listing in any other directories may not bring much either in terms of page rank boost or higher web traffic.
Some seo experts state that listing in niche directories is still valued by Google. While this statement looks logically correct, it still does not hold when you apply the Google no page rank for links purchased. In fact, I see a subtle effort by certain seo blogs to keep some directories alive by recommending them.
But web site owners have to see that it is not always possible to get a link without exchanging something with other website owners. In fact, Google has no problem if you create a link resource page with links and a brief text to sites which are based on the same theme as yours. Also, you can always exchange links with websites which have same theme and topics as yours. So, if exchanging is ok, buying a link should be too, as long as you do not over do it. Buying a link, may be easier in a few cases, but not always. And a webaster of a website which has high rank may not want to link to all sites, unless he/she is sure . Remember buying a link from a website owner with your same theme is easier said than done.
Where does this leave our link building experts. Remember a link building expert will probably have created an inventory of websites from which it is possible to get links. Now, to serve you, for your website with a particular with a particular theme, a link building expert has to search and create a new inventory of websites with relevance to your website. All this means, a link building expert has to work full time for getting you links on a continuous basis. This in turn means that link building is an expensive and out of reach for small and medium website owners. So, all the low cost link building services you see on Google and Yahoo are many a times not worth the money.
So, where does this leave the text link brokers ?
Let us recall that Google hates any kind of patterns in your incoming links. By hiring text link brokers and other such inventory based agents, you are putting yourselves under risk, you and your competitor may be getting links from similar sources. In future, the risk may turn out to be a grave risk as Google may go hard on link buyers. If you consider how the whole link building story has progressed, you will see that Google started discounting links with same anchor text. Google has now started discounting links which are purchased. Google also discounts links which are from forums and free web pages, unless the free web pages are having a high page rank. Google discounts links from directories.
So, be aware of any expert who says i will get you links for $100 per month or $300 per month, because, link building involves, writing great content, identifying web sites which are relavent to your website, contacting the web master, offering a proposal, negotiating and following up to ensure that the terms are honoured. This is a full time work which cannot be done as a part time service.
So, how did http://www.text-link-ads.com get back its rank ? You will have known the answer ….