FAQ: Is buying links outdated or worthwhile?

White hat? Don’t buy links!

In a 100% ethical, white-hat campaign that you’re confident about, buying links is never recommended as Google can pick up on this and penalise your site accordingly.

Plus, the site you’re buying the link from can always discontinue the arrangement, leaving your site with a chequered history of fluctuating comings & goings of significant links, which decreases your site’s trust factor and impacts its performance.

Why can’t people stop it?

If you were offered a link from the Adobe.com homepage or the Microsoft.com homepage for example, with all its link equity, and it would cost $1m for one year, and you were confident enough about SEO to know that this link would make your site popular enough to earn many millions more than you otherwise would within 12 months, it’s surely a tempting opportunity, so long as it’s confidential and not pointing to a domain that needs protecting dearly, because there’s always an overhanging risk of being caught. You might not risk this on a white hat site that you have long-term ambitions with, but on a site that doesn’t matter much it’s a no-brainer. Because of this basic logic, so long as link equity has a value there will always be a market for trading it, and there will always be people who earn a good profit via buying it.

Typical agency trick — paying in kind, not with cash

Most agencies do buy links but are also well aware that it’s strictly against Google’s rules, so instead of paying with cash they usually offer a cheap product to be reviewed and don’t explicitly ask for a dofollow link even though that’s their goal. They play the numbers game, knowing that if they give out free products for bloggers to review they will usually place a good link in their review page. Some simply offer to write for the blog, and slip links in using their own editorial discretion, pretending it’s a useful part of the article – this is a common guest-blogging tactic.

In these ways, agencies and site owners can positively say “we don’t buy links” when really they’re operating within a grey area that could easily be described as buying links. You could call this grey-hat SEO, and Google doesn’t yet hold a firm stance on it until it becomes a very large organised system that’s easily observable by browsing the site’s backlink profile, then it becomes classified as a black-hat link-scheme and warrants a penalty for having an artificial link profile.

Buying sites vs buying links

Owned Media is much more reliable than Paid (rented) Media though, which is what we’d be doing by paying for a link on someone else’s site – we’d be renting it and if the site owner wanted to take that link down there’s nothing we could do about it, we’d be evicted, then the fluctuation would ultimately be detrimental to our site’s standing in Google in the long-run. Thus, acquiring that site, and using it to link to your own other site, is a far superior strategy, budget permitting, so long as the numbers add up, provided you keep both sites distinctly independently registered, hosted, designed, authored, linked, etc. But this is also black-hat SEO — you’ll get penalised for doing it if you get found out.

When is link-building not link-scheming?

Is any pro-active, direct linkbuilding effort really white-hat or is it always a form of black-hat link-scheme? One might suggest that only passive, organic linkbuilding is ethical, white-hat linkbuilding, whereby you simply create a good site and shout about it then wait for people to think about linking to it, on their own volition (without prompt, encouragement or incentive).

I wonder how many digital agencies would employ an SEO Manager with that attitude though! Share your thoughts below!

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