Having other sites linking to your site is one of the keys to building traffic. Search engines, like Google, views a link as a vote for another site – the rational being that you would not link to another site if you do not think it was good. Therefore, the more sites linking to you, the higher your search engine ranking.
Not all links are worth the same. Links from big sites with high Page Rank are worth far more than smaller sites with low Page Rank. So how much is a link worth? I decided to enter a few sites into a text link ads calculator to find out. The Calculator gives an estimate on the market price of a link. The price of a link depends on the website category, its Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking, where the link is placed, the number of links sold, and a bunch of other factors. To give a more apples to apples comparison I stuck to technology-based sites and set the number of links sold to just one. Prices shown are for the cost of placing a link on the front page for one month.
- Engadget – $11,440
- Gizmodo – $11,440
- Tech Crunch – $11,132
- Ars Technica – $1,540
- Techeblog – $1,344
- Tom’s Hardware – $1,232
- AnandTech – $1,232
- TechMeme – $384
- Digg – We Can’t Print That Many Zeros
- Slashdot – More Than You Can Afford
Yes, that is what it actually said when I entered Digg and Slashdot. Whether the sites can get this kind of pricing for a link is anyone’s guess. Just for the hell of it, I entered this blog and got $132.00 for a link. Not too bad.