Links – to buy or not to buy?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | December 17th, 2007

There has been a lot of controversy over Google’s recent statements that buying links is bad, or somehow unethical. Inbound links are a significant factor in causing one web site to rank higher than another for a particular keyword phrase, and for as long as this has been common knowledge, people have been buying, selling and trading links in an effort to improve their ranking. Google has always said to build your web site as if search engines don’t exist – i.e. build it for your visitors, and leave it up to Google to determine which sites are the most relevant to search engine users. As of late, Google’s engineers seem to be unable to eliminate the spam in their SERPs (search engine results pages) and they are now coming to the end user to do their job for them, by reporting paid links. They are also telling webmasters to include the nofollow tag (rel=”nofollow” ) on any paid links on their web sites (as well as telling advertisers to only purchase links that include the nofollow tag). Now, I could be wrong, but isn’t that contrary to Google’s advice to “design your web site as if search engines didn’t exist”?

So will your web site be penalized for buying or selling links? It might, but in a realistic world, probably not, and definitely not anytime soon. Think about how long it took before some of the older practices such as keyword stuffing and hidden text were penalized. You also need to consider risk versus reward. If you have a relatively new web with little to no traffic, then you really don’t need to worry because you have nothing to lose. Develop a powerful online presence and then deal with what may happen when the time comes. If you have an established web site with substantial traffic, chances are it is coming from multiple sources, not just the search engines anyway, so again, you have little to lose. Besides, do you really want to allow fear of what may or may not happen three to five years from now to diminish your revenue today? Business always involves a certain degree of calculated risk and people that aren’t willing to take risks never achieve great success.

My advice? Continue to buy links from quality web sites that are oriented to the same demographic you’re trying to reach so that you benefit both from live traffic and improved organic ranking. When you look at the big picture, there is no way for any search engine to effectively combat paid links, nor is there any reason for them to.

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