If you are buying links, then what is the best value? Are you paying masses of bloggers to talk round you on low page rank web sites, or fewer to give your website some buzz on higher ranking web-sites?
The problem is that it is not always clear from a page rank, or a count of incoming links, merely how popular a blog is. Even a low ranking weblog may have thousands of unique daily traffic, whereas only because a weblog has a huge page rank does not guarantee any traffic per day.
So, if you could, looking at the traffic stats is a amazing starting point to selecting where to place your adverts. But, this merely works if the blogs that you are advertising on are highly relevant to your theme and can send you some of their traffic.
But lots of advertisers are more interested in the search engine benefits of buying links. Rightly or wrongly, this is the case. So, what are the best links?
Well once more, links from a relevant page on a website are always much better than links from a completely different theme of page. The major search engines are thought to differentiate between links that are on relevant pages and links that are from a random page. But even links from off topic pages can work, just not as well.
Then, of course, a link from a page of, let's say, a page rank 4 page are more beneficial than from a lower page rank page. But how much so? Well, as a rule the consensus is that a link on a page is worth around 3 - 5 times the value (in search ranking terms) of a link on a page of 1 rank below it. So, if you buy 4 links on a PR3 page, you have roughly the same search engine benefits as 1 link on a PR4 page.
But, what does that mean if you are paying bloggers to post round you? Well, roughly speaking, you would expect a well ranking website to result in your advert being placed on a post with some sort of page rank, whilst one without a rank is practically without doubt not going to have a ranking on the post pages.
We'll also look at typical costs. For a 100 word advert on a PR0 site, you may be look at paying the blogger around $1.50. For a PR1 blog the fee may be $2.50 and for PR2 $5. OK, the home page's Page Rank does not always correlate to the post page's rank, but you might see that at these levels, for paying round twice the cost, you are actually getting 3 - 5 times the value.
So surprisingly, paying more for less links might be better. Of course, buy loads of links and you may be lucky and get in early on a blog that will in future become a very well ranked blog. An excellent low host high value link, but not guaranteed.
So, for the best value links, look for blogs that might place themed posts that have a good page rank. They may price more, but the value you get back should be even better.