Link indexing search engine surprise.

[MeanSEO]

6 months ago I stared a new site – a local and travel directory for a small area in 2 states. I made sure to link into the site from some of my other established sites as well as friend’s sites.

I decided that I wanted the kick start the sites linking program so I went out and got as many free links from recommended sites I could as well as bought some from well known reputable site including on Yahoos directory. In total I must have collected 50 inbound links this way.

Rankings are doing well and the site keeps growing so I am happy and making a new site that caters to a different geographic area and decided to start submitting to sites who google lists in its directory as inbound links to me. Of all the sites that showed linking into me (yahoos directory listing doesn’t show up!) the only 2 from my swap and buy link campaign were a free link I swapped links with and a link I paid only “$20 for life”.

Before you make a statement, I made sure that I submitted to high ranking PR pages that did not hide my urls, use java etc.

1) Did I waste almost $1,500 in bought links? Yahoo shows almost all the links but send me almost ZERO traffic as apposed to google and MSN where I am kicking butt.

2) I have perfect code (clean and every page including CSS validate 100%) , hand made unique content on HUNDREDS of pages, no spam, no stuffing, hand made site maps (to many links for one map), no flash – a “perfect site” Yahoo indexed many pages but I almost never get traffic and I paid them $299 a year!

3) Anyone think that Google is hiding the links it likes from me or am I being paranoid?

[innominds]

1)I dont think you have wasted a good amount of money in buying links. I feel instead you can do it freely. Anyway now you have to concentrate on getting that money back.
2) Validating with CSS has nothing to do with traffic. But instead it gives a decent look.
3) Google is lazy and thus shows only a part of the share of the links. One can rely on yahoo for knowing back links.
4) The last and final step of your sucesss is to get more and more quality backlinks only from the quality sites.

[incrediblehelp]

Checking who is linking to you from the Google operators is not accurate, so yes they may or may not actually see these bought links. Of course you understand Google does everything in its power not to count paid links right?

[MeanSEO]

Of course you understand Google does everything in its power not to count paid links right?

I know in my heart that is right but funny how all the Search Engine Experts talks about the "top directories" and write press relases and blogs and bottom line - they are wrong.

I know there is no silver bullet in SEO but tools or methods that kick start sites are nice things to have in our tool chest.

[incrediblehelp]

Hey I am never going to preach not to buy links. I know of some good places to buy them and their is no real way Google can figure out that their paid or not. SEO's will flip out once Google starts "guessing" which links are paid and which are not.

[MeanSEO]

I know of some good places to buy them and their is no real way Google can figure out that their paid or not.

PM me those places and I will tell you what $20 link and what free links worked. ;)

[incrediblehelp]

Their is no one certain place. For ever client it is different for relevancy. Just part of Link Building 101.