Summary: Don’t buy ‘follow’ links for SEO (i.e. those that pass link juice). Google doesn’t allow it. Acceptable strategies include:
- using pay per click;
- paying someone to write about your site; or
- paying someone to request links on your behalf (but not pay for the links).
So you’ve already established why you need links to your website. Links are a bit like votes as far as search engines are concerned. If there’s two sites that Google values as roughly as valuable as each other in every other way, the one with the most quality inbound links will rank higher.
What do we mean by ‘quality’ inbound links? The link needs to be relevant, from an authority that Google trusts. Ideally you need the link to have the right anchor text too (i.e. ‘SEO friendly websites’ rather than ‘Click here’). So it’s not easy to get good quality links to your site, especially if you’re still working on building up your content. How do you convince authority sites to link to you, let alone use the anchor text you’re looking for?
With all these hurdles, it’s no wonder that people consider buying links.
Why would I buy links?
Buying links (that pass link juice) means you can pick a trusted, authority site (in Google’s eyes) and get them to link to you regardless of the quality of your content. It also means you can choose the anchor text.
Why shouldn’t I buy links?
Buying links that pass link juice is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Google has put a lot of time and effort into detecting these type of paid links so that websites who practice this don’t gain an unfair advantage. Their guidelines state that such paid links shouldn’t be used for improving a website’s page rank. All links must be obtained freely and screened by the website owner. This means that links included in widgets, hit counters and Wordpress templates do not comply with Google’s guidelines, even if they are visible (unless the distributor of the widget, hit counter or template is actually in the business of supplying widget software, hit counters or templates and is linking back to their business – otherwise the link does not pass the relevancy test).
So what’s the difference between buying ads (which is allowed) and buying links? Website owners are permitted to buy ads for increasing traffic and improving branding. To comply with Google’s guidelines, these aren’t to be purchased for the purpose of increasing page rank. Google recommends that a ‘nofollow’ attribute is used for such ads, giving them no value for the purpose of SEO.
Are there any ways I can give link building a helping hand?
Paying someone to write about your site on a social media site such as Digg is acceptable. You can also pay a company that specialises in building links, but only to request links on your behalf – not to buy them for you.
Pay per click ads such as Adwords and Yahoo search marketing are also permitted. These are easily recognisable by Google’s bots and aren’t worth anything in terms of page rank.
How do people buy links?
Some sites sell links directly and will offer advertising space openly. Sites advertising links for sale are likely to be spotted by Google though in manual reviews, and those links won’t be worth anything for the purpose of your page rank.
Link brokers are the next way to buy links – these companies are marketplaces that hook up sites who want to sell links with people who want to buy them. Often, the link broker will give the advertiser a set template to use on their site so that the broker can put the links onto their site without bothering them further. These are really easy for Google’s spiders to spot and disregard.
Some sites offer links in exchange for a charitable contribution. Unless the link is actually relevant to your site, it’s likely this would be classed as a paid link and frowned on by Google. To find such sites, try searching for phrases such as ‘please visit our sponsors’ and ‘thanks to the following donors’.
What’s the best strategy?
The best strategy is not to buy links that pass link juice but to create genuinely useful content and seek links from websites that are related to your own. The effort involved in buying links that won’t be detected as paid links by Google is commensurable with the effort involved in gaining quality links by asking people to link to good articles.
You can also look at building your own links by creating social media posts linking to your site, and creating content for <a href=”http://www.angelseo.co.uk/kb/link-building/getting-links-to-your-site-using-article-directories/”>article directories</a>.
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