Word Clouds: Don’t Click That ‘Buy’ Button!
Posted by Mike | Filed under Link Building, SEOA word cloud is a website or a webpage contains a collection of ‘tags’ or words that describe another website. These tags are used as anchor texts and are linked to another website.
Most of these word clouds operate by selling available tags to webmasters at a low price, and charge more for additional customization like colors, bold tag, italic tag and the underline tag.
Now, have you ever wanted to buy that permanent PR4 link worth one dollar hoping that it’ll add to your backlinks? Think again. Most word clouds use existing domains which already have PR, so most of the backlinks that they have are there because of the previous site that used the domain, not because the word cloud actually deserved some quality backlinks.
Please take note, not all inbound links will help your site, especially if they are from those from word clouds (or link farms). These links are considered as trash by search engines like Google and Yahoo. The reason for this is that word clouds do not contain any original content. Most word clouds only have one page and consist of nothing but links, and because of this, your PageRank and search engine rankings will not be boosted by them.
What about faster search engine indexing? No, those link farms are rarely visited by search engine crawlers/spiders since they have little to no original content.
It’s not just the “useless” backlink, you will not even gain targeted traffic from these sites because they are not heavily promoted. Your money will be better spent on website reviews, ad spaces and strong directory submissions.
A tip on buying links: If you really want to buy cheap links, buy from related sites and purchase them in bulk. Most people offer discounts if you buy a lot. Plus, you will benefit from the links that related sites give you.
Although I think your analysis is generally on target I do not think it is absolute.
We built a word cloud as an experiment a year ago and we have found that the search engines do spider it and we also get a decent amount of traffic from the site.
Hi Wasabi,
First of all, thanks for reading the post.
Hmmm… you’re getting a decent amount of traffic from word clouds? But… do you think people actually go to word clouds to look for something they’re interested in? I don’t think so, they would rather search Google/Yahoo or find what interests them in directories.
You may have received some visitors, but I don’t think they were that interested in what you had to offer.
It may be true that some word clouds are getting crawled by search engines, but these are rare occasions since most word clouds just use existing domains with PR (meaning it was not the word cloud itself which was crawled, the one that the SE spider visited is the old site).
People would be better of buying links/reviews from related websites/blogs than links from word clouds.
Again, thanks for visiting our blog. Good luck!
- Juggler
I very much agree with this post.
In addition, adding your site to a word cloud puts a up a big red flag saying “I buy links for PR”. Google is trying to crack down on that, why make it easy for them.
The only time I think a word cloud might payoff is if you are targeting less experienced webmasters. When they buy a link they will check it and if you give them another cheap link opportunity they are likely to buy from you too.
Good post!
Thanks for saving me a dollar. Actually, I did take the bite several months ago thinking, “what the heck.” Well, as you fully understand the link was valueless with the next PageRank update.
I now regret placing a valuable link on this site. I don’t want to be perceived as someone who participates in link farms, just what word cloud sites seem to perpetuate.
No problem guys. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this post.
Matt, it’s good that you’ve realized the truth about word clouds.
Bidding directories are 10x better than word cloud sites.Since they are using category structure there won’t be more than 10 or 20 OB links.Its much better to invest the money there.Word CLouds = Alt + F4
[…] Word Clouds: Don’t Click That ‘Buy’ Button! […]
lol, I actually thought about buying a link from one of these sites, because it was only $1. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction
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[…] worth it. Most of them use expired domains and their current PageRank will not last long. Read my article about word clouds to know more about […]