Dangers in buying links discussed
If you’re like many webmasters, you know the importance of getting other relevant websites to link to you. This is old news, yes. However, there has been, on a continually growing basis, discussions about the dangers of purchasing links. Namely, that search engines will somehow punish your website for employing the use of paid links to increase your search engine rankings.
I’m all for purchasing links if you’ve got the capitol and are smart about it. Personally, I would never go after a link that would look severely out of place and was obtained without any visible merit: such as having a brand new 3 page website and instantly obtaining a prominent link from an eight year old PR7 website. That would seem a little fishy to me, and if search engines were somewhat smart (which they are), it’s likely that some algorithm could detect this anomaly and if there are repercussions for this; well, they would likely happen.
There’s a pretty good discussion going on over at the v7n.com forums. In particular I wanted to draw attention to what John Scott states in one posting on the form, regarding common mistakes when purchasing links:
1. Repeating the same anchor text in hundreds of link. Search engines can easily detect anything that isn’t unique. So keep it unique by varying the anchor text.
If you’re going for “web hosting”, for example, you could use dozens of variations: web hosting, affordable web hosting, quaity web hosting, click here for web hosting, etc, etc. Ideally each link should be unique.
2. Site-wide links. I never buy site wide links for link popularity/rankings. When I do buy site wide, I do so for traffic.
3. PR10, PR8, PR9 links - those make me nervous. It smacks of buying PageRank, and that’s one way to get on Google’s radar.
4. Irrelevant links. Don’t go buying links for your office furniture site from a script directory site.
5. Editorial integrity. Say you have a web hosting site, and a webmaster blog is selling links. If that webmaster blog is selling links to viagra sites and debt consolidation sites, don’t do it.
6. Going overboard. All things in moderation, including link buying.
7. Bought vs organic as a percentage. I believe that bought links should make up a small part of your overall link profile.
Whether or not there are major consequences for link buying remains to be seen by me, or seemingly anyone else that has responded in this conversation thus far.
Any thoughts on this?
Reader's Comments
On number 7. If your doing a good job in your link buying there really shouldn’t be a differance between the two. A good example is in this blog post.
You have a link to John’s site. Is that organic or paid? Could be either way. If you are carefull how you buy, no one including Google should be able to tell the differance.
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