Why Buying Links is NOT a Good SEO Practice
Link building is not as easy as some SEOs make it sound. The truth is that many SEOs that promise thousands of links in several days get these links by buying links. Buying links will get you a good amount of links way faster than organically building up the number of inbound links to your site but the truth is that it isn’t that good an idea because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
Of course Google wouldn’t penalise your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. However, there is a good chance that they will find out. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.
For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. However, you should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only (no passing of page rank) by…
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag; or
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.
Today is May 13, 2008
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The article you mentioned has some pretty good points. I’ve never thought of some of them. However, I find it hard to believe that Google or any other search engine would do more than devalue a purchased link. This is just my opinion - otherwise wouldn’t SEO and individuals companies buy sloppy or easily detectable links for their competitors?
I personally don’t think buying links is a wise decision just in case - plus there are other ways to get good links. Either way, thanks for the the article.
I do not agree for link buying. For me its a form of cheating.
I understand and agree with the concept of not buying links but its okay to submit to a paid directory, correct?
Paid directories are fine but the truth is that you should still choose the paid directories you submit too. Not because it will penalize you but because you want to make sure you’re not wasting money when you can simply use it for better things that would yield clearer results.
If you truly want to rank for a competitive keyword term then you pretty much have no choice but to buy links, giving you control over anchor text etc.
All the top, recognized SEOs (Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Aaron Wall etc) know this, and although they don’t state it, they too know that getting a website ranking for a competitve term needs strong inlinks with the correct anchor text.
I am not saying go out and buy a million links, but if you choose your purchases carefully, Google will not catch you and your rankings will no doubt improve!
[…] have already stated my position on buying/selling links but realised that I didn’t mention anything about exchanging links. In my opinion exchanging […]