I have quite a few domains, all finance related. I just recently put new blogs on each so they are new sites (less than a month old) but all finance related (loans/remo/mortgage/credit cards/debt/insurance). Also, they are spread over about 20 different IPs (mostly diff. class c’s, etc.). I’ll be uploading content to them on a daily basis (god willing).

Admittedly they won’t be award-winning in-depth sites but I will be selling link space on each. I realise since they are new selling 1 link may not fare much cash but would asking for say £100/month to have a link on 25 different domains for example be justified? Too little? Too much? Why?

So, in the example above, that would be 25 finance domains with each site having x-amount of pages (e.g. 30 pages each now x 25 domains = 750 links) and increasing over time.

Btw, each domain is at least 18 months old with some about 3 1/2 years old but the sites on them are new.

Thanks for any advice. Thought I’d ask since this is about buying links

My personal opinion is that I’ve found the insurance and personal finance sector in general to be one of the least creative I’ve come across. OK, the product isn’t that interesting at all but as insurance insiders (rather than just SEOers), we all know a fair amount of information which the customer doesn’t that could open their eyes some what.

Plenty of ways to make that into something a little bit creative and getting some inbound links coming in (perhaps not on the confused million pounds offer scale though). I think the most creative people have got is to put a graph together to show how prices are rising or falling. [yawn]

It depends on the cost-benefits – check out Google trends – if the site you’re going to buy performs in the top 3 terms for something like “cheap car insurance” then I know you’ll get something like 250 to 80 valid quotes per day. And if they rank for more than just one term then you could be looking at more quotes per day and therefore more revenue.

We also had thought that if we came up twice then we’d get more customers, but then we’d end up maintaining two link campaigns and could possibly spread ourselves too thin and end-up underperforming.

On the other hand look at Endsleigh, they’ve got a few well ranking sites for car insurance ranking for different keywords (i.e. 17to40) to try and bag those extra few customers.

So ultimately it depends on how big your budget is – if you can afford to spend £150k upwards per year on SEO then go for it.

@insurance seo guy & rex
100% with you, create good content – link bait – and hope it’s genuinely good enough for people to link to.

The only trouble is, it’s very difficult to create an original “link baiting” scheme – for example you could say that Confused’s £1M giveaway is a “link baiting”/”publicity” scheme – but is it actually working?

Not only that, but where insurance is concerned, if one company thinks of a good link-baiting idea then it would be easy for competitors to copy that same idea. And really, how else can you dress up “insurance” – it’s pretty dull to the average consumer.

The Algo is built on links.

We all agree that quality has always worked over quantity for long term stability; but links ARE the currency nonetheless.

Its a difficult decsion for many of us to make:

Head down the dark path of buying links, get cought and potentially disappear for a very long time.

OR

Stay in the light and bait links through eternal quality content and hope one day you rank.

We all think our sites offer something to the customer and to be fair most in the arena I work in (insurance) do provide the customer what they are looking for.

SO, we continue to fight to get to the first page and then onto the summit….

Agree with you, although other people in this thread can’t distinguish between lazy/corner cutting tactics and what SEO is all about…

Moneyexpert tried the DP network for insurance last year and google knocked them back on those terms, so will be interesting to see how long it lasts this time, think it lasted a couple of weeks last time. Prior to them, Fool.co.uk used it, again didn’t last more than a few months, so unlike other industries google does have a history of not allowing DP using sites to rank for Insurance terms for too long. We will see.

My main beef with the tactics used in ranking in insurance isn’t with buying links per say – I believe Google have no right to dictate whether or not a website can advertise on another – its more a question of style.

I’d rather be the SEO who can get top rankings for finding relevant neighbourhood links and able to increase the natural linkability of a website via good content, than an SEO who just signs up to a network and throws a lot of money at the problem. Half of that money goes to waste since they appear on irrelevant websites, and so you have to make up for a lack of style with sheer volume of links. GoCompare, BestDealInsurance etc just spammed thousands of very unrelated websites and yet still got good results, but its like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut – its possible to get similar results by just doing good research and targeting quality over quantity links (and yes, I do speak from experience not ranking envy)

If anything the paid link debate shows the Google algo isn’t as good as all those Google PhDs would have you believe, being as it relies on paid link reports from human beings (With all the politics involved in that) rather than the Google algo being able to sort it out itself.

I would say paid text links then are still a very viable option, especially in those industries (such as insurance) where there are high payoffs for being top ranked, but I wouldn’t rely on it on the long term since Google will eventually manage to automate it (I wonder if they are compiling all those paid link reports to feed into their machine and identify all paid links automatically one day)

Granted, there may be a penalty from Google for spammy link profiles as we’ve seen recently from GoCompare, Confused etc… but then after a few months Google will forgive and forget!! So what’s to stop everyone from going completely black-hat if all they have to fear is a few months ban from Google, and then it’s back up to your old spot.

Also, whilst I’m on the subject – Best Deal Insurance weren’t doing anything with their car insurance page – so I doubt it’ll bother them that they’ve suffered a penalty there.

@Peter
We were recently faced with a decision to buy out a competing site that ranked well in the car insurance industry. However, ultimately we decided against it. The owner let it slip how much his link-building budget was costing him per month and at the time the site had begun to fluctuate on the SERP’s.

We figured that we could better spend that money on our own SEO since we weren’t that far away from the site we were going to buy.

On the flip-side, if you’re ranking on page 10 or below and you’ve got a large budget, then buy it. It’ll take you 6 months to get a decent ranking position and maybe cost you as much the buyout to get there.

Or have they learnt their lesson and will be good little SEO’s from now on?

“Lastly, I thought everyone in Insurance read this blog, obviously not as there are still sites that think paid blog posts are their way to the top – amazing”

It is mate.

Go Compare are in 4th.

Are you?