How Buying Links Can Hurt Your SEO

My clients and company get solicited daily by link sellers.  They ‘promise’ to go out and purchase 83,234 inbound links to your web site to help your web site with Organic SEO.  I’m sure you get the same unsolicited offers daily, but Here’s the truth:

Buying links is advertising, NOT organic SEO.  While link building is a vital component of a successful organic SEO campaign, paying for those links is considered shady, in fact, Google penalizes organic rankings if it finds a large amount of paid inbound links pointing to your web site.  Google has actually setup a ‘report paid links’ section on it’s web site designed to help keep the organic results squeeky clean. Here’s what Google has to say:

“Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.” - Google

Paid links would obviously skew results and create an unfair advantage for businesses trying to rank higher in the organic results: The best rule of thumb for getting high quality inbound links to help SEO is to generate high quality and relevant content on your web site and make it easy for others to link to you. You may also wish to participate in relevant web based forums and blogs and offer your insight and wisdom on a regular basis.

Need help navigating Internet marketing and SEO? Call me today: In Orlando: 407-830-4550, Nationwide: 866-998-6886.