Paid Links and SEO? Are they really bad? They seem to work!

Posted June 25th, 2009 by Mike Volpe

Posted on behalf of a friend who emailed me:

I was going through the HubSpot SEO 101 webinar and looking at the black hat vs. white hat slide some doubts came to my mind.  We have been using 3-way linking strategies for our SEO, and that has given us very good results in terms of page rank. It is a service you pay and you have to put one page inside your site that links to many different things (not-related to our business) and we get links from lots of sites. However, we are a bit nervious since we believe Google can consider it a “cheating” strategy. What do you guys think about that? Is that risky? Do you have any tip that you think can help ups to take the best SEO decition in the long term?

 
 

 

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Toni Aničić's picture

Toni Aničić 1 year 9 weeks 6 days 22 hours ago

Google actually has a team of real life people that are checking out if someone is buying links.

There is also a great chance that once your competitors realize you bought links, they will report you via Google's webmaster tools and Google will investigate it.

 

Don't buy links.

Yes, paid link sare BAD and against the rules.

Mike Volpe's picture

Mike Volpe 1 year 10 weeks 6 days 16 hours ago

Paid links can work in the short term, but if and when Google figures it out, you will get penalized.

Google’s policy is very clear. You are not supposed to use paid links. It sounds like they have not caught you… yet.
 
"Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating."
"However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
 
 
More relevant discussions I found:
 
 

What about paid link directories?

Daniel Lynton's picture

Daniel Lynton 1 year 9 weeks 9 hours 15 min ago

In the hubspot competitive analysis link grader, I found a lot of my client's competitors listed on paid link directories - most of these links had a 90+ link grade. The Yahoo directory charges $300/year to be "considered" as a link. Are all these paid link directories evil?

 

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