I think it is time to go over a simple concept which still seems to be one that a lot of site owners haven’t really got an understanding of – link quality.
Quality of links is a hard thing to measure. Generally you want links from a site which is in a similar area of relevance to your own. Links from a site about body building to your online pet store probably won’t help much, but links from a blog about pet ownership would be very useful. Search engines and users are discerning and will only be interested in a link if it is relevant.
In this way, you could say that 100 irrelevant links could be worth 1 relevant one from a good site. In the end the cost might be the same – weigh it up in your head!
However, nothing beats natural links. Paying will get you so far but the real benefit comes from the snowball effect of good content people want to share. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be especially good for this kind of thing.
I haven’t gone into much detail as there is a hell of a lot of information out there about links and their usefulness, but I just wanted to get the concept of “quality beats quantity” into people’s heads once more.