At one time every link that was pointed to a site was a good link, and the more links that were pointed to a site, the higher the site ranked. That went out the door around 2005 when Google introduced the concept of a quality link.
The quality of a link matters today. You will no longer achieve higher search results rankings merely by buying hundreds or thousands of links from poor quality directories. Yes, almost all of these types of offerings are for links in poor quality directories.
The PageRank of the directory’s home page does not matter and is not an indication of a director’s quality. Pagerank is an indicator of the cumulative PageRank values of all pages linking to that page. The PageRank of the page where your link appears is what matters and almost all inner pages in poor quality directories are flagged with a PageRank of “n/a”, which is essentially “less than zero.” Links from those directories carry that same value.
It is also not a good idea to buy links found in the footers or sidebars on sites in related industries. A link that is repeated on every page in a site is called a sitewide link. At one time each one counted as a link, but with the introduction of the link quality concept, that went out the door and 5,000 sitewide links may only count as one link. It is common for designers to add a link to their site in the footers of the sites that they design. That will not likely harm their site, but the value of those links is not what it once was.
In general, it is not a good idea to buy links from a any site where is it obviously a purchased link that is set up to pass PageRank. That would be a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google sums up their position on linking in a Webmaster Tools article about Link Schemes. Here is an important quote from that page: “The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.” There are also several warnings on that page that point to issues that are a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines and could harm a site’s rankings. The guidelines change periodically, so it is a good idea to review them a couple of times per year.
A quality backlink is a link that looks like it would naturally occur from a site where the author likes the information on the page he or she is linking to. Typically, that means it is a contextual link (embedded in the text of an article) and from a site in a related industry or from a page that focuses on the same topic as the page being linked to. This is called relevance. That is the way that links naturally occur on the web. Links from unrelated pages will likely be devalued as a lower quality link.
Google and other search engines do expect site owners to seek links to their sites. Link building is a critical aspect of SEO. However, if you want to see the best results from you link building program, is important to make sure that you seek quality links from sites and web pages with topic themes that are related to the focus of your web site.
