A Few Words on Buying Links
A Few Words on Buying Links
Link building can be quite tough, particularly in the early days when you’re still trying to build your reputation, find the right people to connect with, and create great content. It is quite understandable that SEOs look for shortcuts to help make the process a little bit easier, and one of those shortcuts is often buying links.Buying Links is Directly Against One of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank: This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a ‘free’ product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.”Google cares so much about this because buying links can change how search results appear for users. They want companies to perform well in search results because they deserve to, not because they have deep pockets and can buy links. Also, note that A Few Words on Buying LinksGoogle explicitly says “links that pass PageRank.” This is where the difference between buying links and buying advertising comes into play.Buying advertising that links through to your website is fine and can be a great practice for building awareness of your business. However, Google do say that if you’re going to do this, then you should make sure that the advertisement doesn’t pass PageRank to your website. There are a few ways you can do this:
Adding the nofollow attribute to the link•Making the link Javascript that Google can not follow•Going via a redirected page that is blocked in robots.txt
These techniques mean that the advertisements will not affect how much PageRank your website receives and, therefore, will not affect how you perform in organic search results. In general, buying links is a risky business, and for most companies is not worth the risk. The short-term gains often outweigh the long-term benefits, and if you’re building a legitimate business that plans on using organic Google results as a means to get customers, then buying links can put that at risk. You can read about the Moz stance on paid links here, which goes into a lot of detail on the reasons behind not recommending it as a practice.