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Link Building by Buying Web Sites

It’s impossible to exhaust all the creative methods of getting new backlinks. A WMW post, Link development by buying competitors, highlights a lesser-used (but powerful) link building method:

My competitors in my business are in 90% of the cases unprofessionell and I just had the idea of increasing our links by buying their websites.

What would be the best way to get their links directing to us? Should we redirect their domain or should we put a bunch of our links on their website? Any other ideas?

I like this method for several reasons:

  • If the site you’re buying has decent, relevant backlinks, than this will be a good Hilltop-type link to your main site
  • You can surround the link  to your main site with links to other authoritative sites, thus putting your main site in a good neighborhood
  • Since you control the entire site, you can put in tons of intra-content deep links (sorta like the Presell pages from WeBuildPages)

Of course when buying and selling assets (and this includes Web sites), I have one golden rule: Buy Cheap, Sell High. If the price is right, go for it! If not, go back to writing high-quality content (or comment spamming).  ;-)

Posted on Jul 27, 2005 by in Text Link Ads News
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Comments

Submitted by Tal on Jul 28, 2005 11:06 am
Be careful that you competitors bad reputation will not stick to your site. As you said, they are unprofessional in 90% of the cases. In this case a recommendation for them worth nothing except from the actual link. However, I must say that this method could be very nice if you avoid explicit connection and if you buy it really cheap.
Submitted by pleeker on Jul 28, 2005 4:16 pm
There's another issue to be thinking about -- when you buy the web site and domain, Google will find out if you bother to update the domain record, as they're an accredited registrar and have access to all that data. And domain-related information was part of the recent patent filing they did, too. So as Tal said -- you want to avoid explicit connection.
Submitted by Jarrod Hunt on Jul 29, 2005 9:42 pm
Microsoft used this tactic when they bought www.linkexchange.com last year. They still rank #4 (recently down from #2) for link exchange.

Looks like the tactic worked very well for them.
Submitted by Esoos Bobnar on Jul 30, 2005 12:29 am
I'm interested in the same point that pleeker brought up. Does that fact that Google is a registrar negate the effect of this tactic, at least somewhat?

At some point that domain record will have to be updated, and you end up with a bunch of sites owned by the same company all pointing at one of their sites.

Not necessarily a problem, but it could be, depending on how agressive you got with your linking.
Submitted by Esoos Bobnar on Jul 30, 2005 12:34 am
'Course, I suppose you could just throw that domain on a credit card that's not connected to your business, and problem solved.