What is a Word Cloud Site?
Several days ago I splashed out a huge amount of money when I purchased a permanent PR5 link for $1.99! Ok so it’s quite a small amount of money and it was a pure impulse decision, made quite quickly and the relative merits of my purchase will be discovered over time.
Well I must admit I was kind of curious to the service offered by the website who sold me the link. So I decided to do a little digging and discovered that the service is connected to the concept of Word Clouds. This post provides an insight into the wonderful world of Word Cloud sites.
A Word Cloud site enables you to buy a text link on their pages that links back to your own website home page. This text backlink can be a single word or a group of words connected with your site and the links anchor text will also contain your keyword(s). A limited number of words are available on a page and these are sold by the owners for a small sum payable usually via paypal. The links back can be customised with color, size etc but this will cost slightly more than the base link price.
I purchased the keywords make money online on a word cloud site for $1.99 but added a splash of orange for an additional $0.99 in order to stand out from the crowd a little. The extra expense is not necessary though as it is the valuable backlink from a page rank PR5 site that you are after. How do these sites gain the valuable PR5 status in the first place, well more of that later.
The original word cloud site concept was devised by Joel Comm, who produced 500words.com, making himself a lot of money very quickly. He now has other sites and also sells the software script to enable others to produce similar sites. However before you rush out to spend your money I discovered that there are many word cloud scripts out there that are available for free such as Word Links Pro whose site contains demos, downloads, FAQ’s etc. I installed the script myself and was very impressed with the software which has all the features required to operate a word cloud site.
So you have the software, the paypal account but how do you get the high PR4-6 site? Well that’s obviously not so easy and straight forward to do. There are suggestions from webmasters that these word cloud sites buy an expiring high PR domain, sell the words for a fast buck and move on before google updates the PR cycle. Although I’m sure that happens, it does show that you must do some homework to protect your own site. Have a look who links into your potential word cloud site, are they themselves high PR sites, are they valuable .edu links, how long is the domain registered for, how many pages does the site have indexed to obtain that high PR status etc ? I believe that there are good word cloud sites out there, that do try to maintain the high PR ranking by adding fresh content but just remember that old piece of advice ‘buyer beware’.
Just remember that the PR5 backlink for a word cloud site will never be as valuable as the PR5 link from an established site with quality content relevant to your niche but in the early days, when you are looking for that all important push to gain quick momentum, a word cloud backlink should provide very cost effective benefits.
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