Are you looking to buy text links for your website? Then ensure that you consider the following before you make the purchase.

1. What is the purpose of the purchase? Are you looking to improve PR or increase traffic? Based on it, get the relevant information from the advertiser like PR of the page where the link will be placed, traffic to his site etc.

2. Demographic of the visitors to the advertiser site. If the site in question is a forum then the number of unique visitors will be less. In such situations your link will be more useful for transfer of PR rather than anything else.

3. Ensure that the link is not a ‘nofollow’ one. If it is a “rel=nofollow” link, Google and other search engines cannot follow the link and you will not get PR benefits.

4. How many links will be placed? This is extremely important. More the number of links, less their value and less the number of visitors.

5. Where will the links be placed? Google is known to penalise sites that have a large number of links in the footer since it looks like spam (and more often than not is). If the advertiser loses his indexed pages in Google you also lose the value of advertising with him.

6. Is the content relevant? Never ever fall in for the lure to buy a large number of links for a low price. Ensure that each link of yours is placed amidst content relevant to your site. Otherwise search engines may look at it as spam and your pages may also be de-indexed.

7. Price. Discuss with the advertiser if there are some discounts for bulk purchase. From experience we suggest that you not buy pre paid advertising for more than three months unless it is a very large and reputed site. Also three months is a good period to see how well the link does.

If all this looks like a lot of overhead you could always let a text ad broker buy text links for you. They will take care of your link relevancy, placement, ad duration, billing etc. Obviously they will charge you for it but then you can be at peace knowing your ad budget is being well utilised.