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As an SEO Consultant I have found that I can typically achieve good results in the SERPS without buying links for my clients. But some legitimate sites, that offer their customer’s great experiences are not always featured in the SERPS. Should they buy links?
Although Google has successfully morphed the issue into a moral one, its more of a business decision than a moral decision. Google’s guidelines were written to best benefit their company. At the end of the day, Google makes a billions of dollars on advertising through adwords and to say that does not effect their decision making in trying to funnel dollars into their program is somewhat naive.
The long and short of the issue is that Google would prefer someone wanting site traffic to advertise in adwords and forget about buying links. Since Google could not say that if you buy an advertisement on any site, you can’t be in the SERPS, the no follow tag was born, but thats a different story.
So, when making decisions regarding your business, its best to write your own guidelines that best fit your needs. They may not exactly match Googles, but they should be close. After all, if you and Google have a showdown, guess who loses.
In writing your guidelines, its a good idea to measure risk against return. Aaron Wall has a great article on if link buying is stupid that sheds some light on the subject. According to Aaron, the ratio of sites busted for spammy links is probably very low, like one out of thousands. With this in mind, if you are in a tough market and really need a good launch, link buying may be something you decide to do.
My perspective is that if you do it, just do it better than the other guys. There is a reason that Google catches some people and does not catch others. Read some stories about who has done it successfully and who has not.
Off the top of my head, I would say that it is a bad idea to approach a site that you are not sure sells links because that is the quickest way to get busted. If the site owner reports you, you may be in trouble.
Vicious Link Buying?
There are very clear cut cases of spamming the search engines that a site may get sand boxed for, however if your off site method is erratic and simple link buying I think the danger is minimal. Basically, if Google punished every site that bought links, all I would have to do is buy links to my competitors and report them as buying links! Google knows this and knows how vicious SEO can be sometimes. They are not going to risk alienating many, many people because of this policy.
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October 9th, 2008 at 6:39 am
I do not ever buy massive amounts of links or any for that matter. I am just starting out and find just doing it yourself is the most effective method of doing so. You never know where your links may end up if you buy them all up.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I have been looking into link building for the last couple of months and was not sure who to trust or how to go about it. That link buying article was very insiteful as was this post. Thank you for the info!
October 14th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think if all these things will be done using brain then goodle can’t define them and site can go out “goole sandbox” quicker.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:59 am
Thirst I would like to point out that Google punished sites for selling links not for buying links. Also I think the ones that where caught were very obvious about it. I know for a fact that a lot of big sites are still doing very well by buying links for PR.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:28 am
Thank you very much for this helpful information. Now if i decide to buy link, I will think twice.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:35 am
This is another good read, penalising link buyers can be dangerous. It’s similar to google bombing your competitors site.
November 13th, 2008 at 8:09 am
I have always tried to stay away from link buying. I feel pretty positive that link buyers will all get thrown in the sandbox someday by google. There was a Q&A by google a couple of weeks ago, where they answered some questions about SEO, and based on what they said, I am much more careful with linking. I wish that I had the link for the transcript, but if you can find it I recommend it!
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
It seems to me that the issue is more about the selling. I think Google is reducing the PR and killing the juice from a site that sells links. In the end you will waste your money paying for a link on a site that is all about selling links. Once they get flagged you will be paying for a useless link.