While renting links is still effective (and the title of this post may sound ludicrous considering I used to work for textlinkbrokers.com), you may want to hold off on renting text links if you are new to the game. There are obvious reasons to be afraid of renting links – fear of penalty from Google, and the fear of putting a fat dent in your wallet, but an SEO with some basic knowledge of how Google generally detects rented links can typically keep you ahead of the curve. Also most experienced SEO’s are working for companies with hundreds of thousands of organic inbound links, making rented links a VERY minor risk. Lets face it, Google treats trusted sites differently than the new guy on the block, and one could reasonably assume it is more difficult to detect algorithmically on site with tons of existing quality links.

New search engine marketers typically don’t have it so easy. (Anecdotal Evidence Alert) I had two potential clients come to me this month, who I had to turn down because they were penalized. (I just don’t need the business that bad to hold their hands through the process) Both of these clients rented links from a “guaranteed first page rankings” type SEO firm. Giant blinking warning sign!!! Most SEO’s don’t make these promises for a simple reason: they have past results they can point to that will seal the deal without resorting to guarantees. Additionally, as an SEO consultant you never really know what the guy before you was doing to screw it up. Trust me. So straight to the do’s and don’ts of renting links.

How to Rent Links Effectively (If You Must)

To rent links effectively there are a few factors you must consider.

1. Links MUST Come From Relevant Pages. Common sense rules the day here. If your site is about donuts – rent links from sites about food. This is probably the most important rule. Google uses a form of Latent Semantic Indexing/Analysis which has a pretty good chance of figuring out if page A is relevant to page B.
2. If Possible Avoid Footer (or indeed header) Links The further away from the quality unique content of the page – the less likely they will pass any decent rankings. In addition this is likely a metric many search engines can detect. A list of links has a fairly easily detectable signature. Caveat: If you can get a footer link from a highly relevant, CLEAN page it may be worth pursuing.
3. Acquiring Links In Quality Content Works Best Links wrapped in a paragraph of real text is harder to detect, and therefore more likely to be seen as natural. I think this is a no-brainer so I won’t belabour the point. If you are looking for in content links, off the top of my head TLA has in text links and TLB has HMP’s
4. Link Velocity Matters If you gain too many links too fast, its easy for Google to detect. Slow and steady wins the race otherwise you look like an automated linking scheme.
5. Vary your anchor text Again, leaving too many markers for search engines to pick up = BAD.
6. DEEP LINK! You always want to maintain a natural looking link profile. Quality sites get deep links to subpages because they have legitimate quality content. This is the link profile you are going for.
7. Renting Works Best to Give a Small Boost to Important Rankings A few rented links on difficult keywords is a reasonable compliment to other less dangerous link building/attracting plans of attack. If renting is your only modus operandi, don’t say I didn’t weren’t warned when you are penalized.

The Big Players

There are quite a decent number of players in the link brokerage game. The two largest are text-link-ads.com and textlinkbrokers.com. Some slightly smaller players include Link Adage, TNX and Teliad. It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment here about any of these companies.