June 23, 2004

This month, Patrick Bragdon of Low Cost Web Hosting Guide is proud to Interview Mark Rosenstein, founder and CEO of Link Rent, a professional link leasing broker, helping companies and their webmasters in increasing their link popularity and Page Rank™.

LCWHG: Hello Mark, and welcome to Low Cost Web Hosting Guide. Can you tell us a bit about your company and what it is you want to achieve?

Sure. Thanks for having me Patrick, its nice to be here. Link Rent.com serves the Web community in providing quality, relevant links to corporate Web sites. Today more than ever, businesses need to be found in the search engines, when people type in certain keywords related to their industry.

If your website isn't on the first page of Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista or any of today's most important search properties, you will lose important, valuable traffic. When people type a keyword or a keyword phrase in a search engine, they expect to find results that will satisfy their query.

OK, that's great-- but how does it relate to your company?

To answer that question, I need first to explain the basics of how Google (and also some other search engines) evaluate websites.

In 1998, when Google just started out as a new search engine, two young Stanford University PHD under-graduates co-developed the Google Page Rank™ algorithm, which is still very much in use today. Page Rank™ was named after Larry Page, one of the two founders of Google.

With Sergey Brin's help (Sergey Brin is the other co-founder at Google), Larry's main goal in developing Page Rank™ was to implement a rather unique method of determining the importance and the relevance of a specific website by the number and the quality of links pointing to it.

Page's reasoning was (and still is): "If I place a link from my website to another site, it is because that site offers valuable information and will be of help to my users".

In essence, Google looks at this as a "vote". If site 'A' links to site 'B', a vote is effectively cast from site 'A' to site 'B'. If a sufficient number of votes are done in this fashion, Google would rank site 'A' more favourably than if there were no "votes" (no links to it).

This whole reasoning is behind the idea of leasing good, quality links that are relevant to your industry or to the products and services your site offers.

Up until about 2002, acquiring good quality links that are relevant to your site wasn't easy. Site owners and webmasters would rely on the mutual exchange of links from their sites, with very limited results in some cases.

One major drawback of this technique is the total lack of control over another person's website. Webmasters were thus at the mercy of other webmasters who could completely remove their links without any advanced warnings. The result of such actions were a major drop in their search engine rankings, which would translate into a big drop in their online sales.

Today, the only sure way you can significantly improve your link popularity and boost your rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, AOL and most of the other search engines is by leasing links from sites that are relevant to your's.

OK, that's great. So in essence, you offer them to buy, or like you seem to call it, you "lease" them links?

Correct. Link Rent.com acts as a broker between the company that needs to lease links, and the company that offers them. In essence, we act as the 'middlemen' which greatly facilitates both transactions.

Today, most people are too busy running and managing their own business, and that certainly makes a lot of sense, since it is their core expertise. Since we deal exclusively in the buying (leasing) and selling of links, we have all the contacts, we know who wants to lease links, and who wants to offer them, but, most of all, we also know how to do it right. To most people, they don't have the knowledge or the tools to carefully execute this delicate process.

But why would a company offer to sell some links off their own websites? Will that help them in any way?

Patrick, a company or a webmaster will sell a link from his site to another for the sole purpose of generating additional income from his own site. If the two sites are relevant (which ideally they should be), it could also help their search rankings too, but the main reason most companies today sell links from their sites is simply to generate that additional revenue.

I see. This is starting to make a lot of sense. So, in essence, if I want to boost my rankings in Google, I place an order to LinkRent.com to lease some links, and then I place them on my site, is that correct?

Precisely. And, about 30 to 60 days later, when Google has noticed those links and included them in its database, your rankings and your PR (PageRank™) will both increase, which will place you further at the start of the search results page. It makes a big difference for websites that are listed on the first page of Google or Yahoo, in comparison from sites that only appear on the fifth or sixth page!

Yes, this would certainly make a lot of sense. But Mark, how much can companies expect to pay for good links that are relevant?

That's a great question Patrick. Our link leasing pricing policy is among the lowest in the industry. To give you an example, a good PR 6 link from a relevant website can cost from about $ 15 to $ 50 a month, depending on the industry, on the number of outbound links already present on that page, plus a few other factors which determine the price of the links.

Another important detail which has a direct impact is the number of links that will be leased at the time of the transaction, as well as the term of the contract. Our standard contract commitment calls for a minimum six month timeframe. Usually, the longer the commitment, the lower the cost. Recently, we have had companies leasing links from us and paying us two years in advance for the links, which translated into more than 40% savings for them, so the lenght of a contract can mean a drastic difference in the price of the links.

I see. Mark, is there any advice you can offer webmasters at this point in time?

I certainly can. One is to negotiate as you would for any other business transaction. We have been in this business since 2002, and I can tell you this is still a relatively new industry, but we are starting to see a bit more competition since the beginning of 2004. Generally speaking, Link Rent's pricing policy is usually at the low end of the scale, which means our prices are very often about the lowest you can find on the Web.

Also, and as I have stated earlier, the longer term you negotiate, the lowest price you will usually get. This also applies to companies that are selling links to other companies. The longer the term, the higher price they will get.

How does Link Rent get paid for its services?

Excellent question, Patrick. Link Rent.com only takes a small profit between the bid and ask prices, depending if you are a buyer or seller of links. Once we quoted you a firm price, that is the final price you will get, independently if you are a buyer or seller. Prices are usually locked-in for a period of twelve months, although this can vary at times.

Mark, thanks a lot for being here today, and I think your link leasing services will interest a good percentage of our users.

Thanks for having me Patrick.

Source: Low Cost Web Hosting Guide.org