Ever hear of people paying to have blog posts written that include links for needed keywords? How about people paying anywhere from 1$ to 1000$s of dollars? It happens regularly. Bloggers will “review” a website then write a blog post that contains external links that use needed keywords the company or organization is looking to promote at the time.

I am not an expert and don’t claim to be. Anything written by Tony Garcia is purely my opinion. I stress, Research to all. Anything I mention can be argued.

Why do people do this you ask? What goes into how you pay for having a blog post written about your company or organization? Search engine optimization companies, webmasters and website owners alike are looking for a few different things when attempting to purchase what I call Blog Links or Pay for Posts. The biggest reason for those paying for the service at least in my experience is page rank.

Here are a few….

• Traffic expected (If you are on a highly popular blog your link may get clicked BUT there’s traffic and then there is how many people actually purchase something after the click)
• Google Pagerank (It obviously costs more depending on the number. YES people pay for it. There are many Blog Review companies that allow pure JUNK blogs into their database BUT they have high page rank.)
• Alexa Rating (Believe it or not. If you could tell me why it is so important to some let me know.)
• Quality of Content (Not many seem to pay attention to it, there are many Blog Review companies that allow pure JUNK blogs into their database.)
• In another post I will get more in depth.

I don’t want to name any companies here but can say that in many studies I have seen where it can help certain industries when looking for better placement for specific keywords. Local search seems to be the popular choice when strategizing the use of paid links through blog posts. There are budgets I have heard of in the 10s of thousands per month. We can bet there are many that pay much more.

Is it beneficial in the Long Term? I wish I could say definitively but I can’t. IF someone out there does say they know positively, Good for them. The page rank thing is only good for however long the writer(s) of the blog update with new posts. In most cases the posts were gone within 4-7 days. Of course there are those that last a bit longer or a bit shorter in terms of time.

Of course we have to assume that the more popular blogs are ‘spidered’ a bit more in turn giving any, if not all pages a lot of pull in terms of rankings and page rank in the long run. I personally am not into the practice of paying for blog posts with links. I have my own blogs obviously and have relationships with various contributors for other blogs I have.

The popular choice is getting as many nice page rank links as possible for the lowest amount possible (in terms of dollars) in no way thinking about or caring about where posts are placed or from where the search engines are finding their links. Whatever though, if it floats your boat and you believe it helps I can’t tell you it isn’t. For the little guys out there I would just try to get a bit more time at the computer working on my own SEO. Start a link campaign of your own, create a sitemap, write some good content, change up the stale tags you have going and things can Start moving.

Pay for Posts; would you do it?