How Buying Links Can Affect Your Off Page SEO

If you’re in a hurry to accomplish a favorable page rank and a high position in the search engine results, you’ve probably heard about or even considered the possibility of purchasing links. Is this a good SEO or one which should be completely avoided? There are conflicting opinions in the SEO world, ranging from those who suggest that you never buy links to companies who are dedicated to the sole practice of providing customers with purchase links in order to increase their off page SEO.

In this article, we'll be looking at the impact of link purchasing so that you can make a decision as to whether or not it’s worth your money…

The Search Engines’ Take on Link Buying

Matt Cutts from Google has stated that Google considers link buying to be outside of their quality guidelines when it comes to getting a good page rank. He also states that “pretty much every other major search engine feels the same way.” The reason for this is that links are considered to be popularity votes for your site within the internet community. Matt states that “Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.”

In other words, the criterion for determining link value is based on a person’s financial investment in purchasing the link rather than the relevance and quality of the link itself. However, this raises the question as to what is actually considered link buying. After all, Google itself, through its Adsense and content network program, assists advertisers in purchasing ad space which provides a link back to their website and to their offer. Some advertisers have claimed that this is a double standard on the part of the search engines and that they need to find a way to filter out the “bad links.”

However, a better approach for you as a business owner would be to take care of filtering out the bad link building practices and make sure that you avoid offers from companies which will use these practices and damage your reputation through shady link building practices…

The Practice of Good Link Buying vs Bad Link Buying

In spite of what the search engines say about link buying, the term itself is really up for interpretation. For example, if you pay an SEO company to build you 100 links a week through posting on social media sites and through content delivery (videos and article marketing), you’re technically buying those links. On the other hand, there are companies who also offer to build you 100 links to your site for a flat fee, but who might engage in questionable practices such as:

       1.      Leaving irrelevant or vague comments in blogs or forums with a link to your site.

The problem with this is that the comments usually don’t get approved by the blog owner and the link never gets built. So you end up paying or 100 links, less than half (at best) are approved and those which are bring you little or no traffic.

       2.      Building links through connecting your site to a link farm or spam site

There are hundreds of companies on the internet which use this tactic when it comes to building links for business owners. This can actually cause your purchased links to damage your reputation instead of improving it and possible get you labeled as a spam site.

       3.      Bulk link building practices where you obtain hundreds of thousands of links in a very short time (a few days).

The search engines are able to see how quickly you obtain your links, and if they see you go from zero to hundreds or thousands within a few days, you look like a spam site. The link building process needs to appear natural, meaning you want to avoid acquiring large numbers of links in a very short time.

So when does it make sense to purchase links? When you hire an SEO firm or specialist who understands the principles of link building, a few of which are:

       1.      Posting links only on relevant sites.

       2.      Using a variety of keywords (based on your site’s keyword strategy) within your anchor texts.

       3.      Using content delivery sites (article and video marketing) to build links using quality content rather than simply posting a link to your site on a link farm.

       4.      Using process of link building which will increase your PR over time, rather than throwing up hundreds or thousands of links within a few days.

       5.      Submitting your site to quality directories (some of which will require a submission fee).

These are all legitimate link building practices and paying a company to take care of these for you is completely normal. What the search engines are weary of is purchasing link building services from companies who engage in bad link building practices.

What the Search Engines Suggest for Purchasing Advertising Links

Search engine companies like Google acknowledge that there are companies who choose to outsource their link building and who will purchase advertising on other sites for the sake of generating traffic, or building buzz for their site.  In these instances, Matt Cutts has suggested that you should use the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the link. According to Matt, the “nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.”

Of course, no follow links don’t provide the same amount of “link juice” which regular links do, but if the purpose is traffic generation or direct advertising, it’s clearly better to use the “nofollow.” This will help you to avoid looking “spammy” to the search engines, and you can separate your link building which is done for the sake of advertising from that which is designed to up your page rank.