It is a commonplace that inbound links, and preferably plenty of them, are needed for high rankings on the search engines. Poor things, they have to have something to go by and although the reciprocal linking industry has devalued the currency of these links tremendously, they are still pretty much the only game in town when it comes to search engine optimization. However, what is the best way to get these links? Should you go through the extremely frustrating and time-consuming process of requesting links from other webmasters, or is it better to throw money at the problem and buy text link ads? Clearly both methods are contrary to the spirit of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, which presuppose that a link is an impartial and objective vote by another webmaster on the quality and desirability of your site. At a guess, this is true for perhaps 2% of all the links on the web; the remainder are paid for or exchanged in an effort to fool the search engines that a site deserves to rank above its competitors.

However, for better or worse, links are still driving search engine positioning to a very great extent, even if the engines are trying to differentiate the value of different links and give little credence to the most blatant examples of link exchange. Given this, what is the best method of getting links that have the highest probability of fooling seach engines into ranking your site highly? Should you pay for them or trade them? Hard-earned experience trying both methods suggests that a combination of the two will work best. Until you have a decent level of PageRank it will be slow and difficult to get other websites that do have PR to exchange links with you, since you don’t have much to offer to webmasters with high PR sites, and it will take a dauntingly long time to develop good PR by linking to zero PR sites. This implies a fairly simple approach: buy a few high PR text link ads, point them towards both your links page and your homepage and wait for Google to give you a respectable PR (say 3 or more) on both pages.