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Backlinks are one of the fundamental factors to evaluate when determining a website’s credibility, relevance, and authority. This is why the practice of acquiring backlinks is considered a very effective way of improving search engine rankings.
Nevertheless, obtaining quality backlinks, particularly through white hat methods, may appear to be somewhat difficult and time consuming. For example, acquiring backlinks through outreach will involve prospecting for link opportunities, creating quality content, building relationships and contacting different authority sites to link to your website. However, your request may be denied, depending on their willingness, quality of your content, and many other factors.
This is why many website owners and SEO specialists seek alternatives by adopting black hat SEO methods such as link buying. While these SEO techniques might boost a site’s rating in search results, they violate search engine rules and, as a result, may attract serious consequences if discovered.
Buying backlinks, in particular, has been and continues to be an effective link building strategy for years. The approach, however, breaches search engine guidelines.
Google, for example, frowns on any form of link buying, which can include exchanging money for links or posts containing links, selling products or services for links, or delivering someone a ‘free’ product in exchange for writing about it and including a link.
Regardless, despite Google’s stance on paid links, purchasing backlinks is still an efficient technique to boost the SEO of your website. However, it would be helpful if you were cautious about where you obtained your links and ensured that they were of high quality.
Overall, even though buying backlinks might be one of the fastest and easiest link building methods, purchasing backlinks still remains a controversial topic in the SEO community. Even though it can contribute positively to a website’s ranking, it can also harm a website’s reputation because it goes against search engines’ guidelines.
Why Do People Still Buy Links?
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Link buying was not always frowned upon. In fact, it was a welcomed link building strategy as well as a good business in the early 2000s. However, just like most other SEO strategies, it wasn’t long before many website owners and search engine optimizers started abusing it. As a result, search engines such as Google have now updated their algorithms to impose restrictions on the practice.
Buying links has become increasingly difficult over the last two decades due to Google’s uncanny ability to seek and remove the SEO benefit of purchased links. Although paid links continue to operate, hiding and getting past search engines is becoming increasingly difficult.
However, an alternative to link buying is to just simply hire the service of a link building agency or an SEO professional who can legitimately enhance your rankings through optimized content creation, content writing, high quality keywords, and backlinks. It is however, also necessary to conduct research and choose a credible agency or specialist who is not simply purchasing links on your behalf.
Nevertheless, there are quite a number of explanations for backlink purchases. Primarily, the aim is to optimize a site for ranking on SERPs. By buying backlinks, small businesses, website owners and SEO professionals can improve their backlink report by getting more inbound links to their website. This will help generate traffic and in turn help the site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
One other primary reason why many website owners, small businesses and SEO professionals still take the risk of buying backlinks is that it saves time. By just buying links, you can avoid the extra workload and time that link building normally requires. It also significantly cuts down the time it takes to start seeing results.
The Advantages of Buying Backlinks
Link buying can be a quick and easy way to boost your website’s SEO. Although it costs money, it just requires minimal work. Rather than spending months or even years attempting to build a solid backlink report organically, you can simply purchase high-quality backlinks from reputable sources. Here are some possible benefits of purchasing backlinks.
Easy Access To High-quality Backlinks
Obtaining high-quality links organically might be difficult at times, as it usually entails a number of time-consuming procedures. This is because it can be difficult to establish a healthy relationship with high authority websites, particularly if your site is new.
However, some reputable backlink vendors often have relationships with these high-authority websites that can provide valuable backlinks to your site. Therefore, if you buy these links from the appropriate sources, you get to access and implement high-quality links, which will improve your overall backlink report and ultimately improve your ranking.
In summary, buying backlinks can be an effective means of improving your site’s backlink report. It can give you access to high-quality backlinks easily without you having to invest too much time and resources in outreaches, building relationships with high-authority sites, or any other organic, usually long form link building strategy.
Easy Outreach and Faster Results
It takes a lot of time and money to reach out to the websites that you want to link to, but it’s easier to find agencies that have already built relationships with such sites and do outreach on your behalf. Purchasing and implementing backlinks effectively, as well as appropriately integrating it with other important SEO techniques provides you a competitive advantage.
Enhanced search engine rankings
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Since link buying appears to be an easy means of acquiring high-quality links, it appears that it will be an effective strategy for improving search engine rankings.
Increased traffic
A high-ranking piece of content is bound to drive visitors to a website. This increased traffic can lead to more conversions, leads, sales, or revenue for both large and small businesses.
High traffic and conversion is however not down to the quantity of high-quality links alone. Alongside other important factors such as quality keywords, the quality of content on a website is especially important. It plays a big role in the decision of a web user to carry out an action.
Disadvantages Of Buying Backlinks
Backlinks are important in establishing a site’s reputation and relevance in search engines, which is why many people take the risk of buying and using them.
Unfortunately, link buying is often like a two-edged sword. It can help a website generate visitors and rank with minimal effort and within a short time. It can also go the other way round. Here are some other downsides of link buying.
Sanctions from search engines
Search engines like Google have established guidelines that expressly prohibits buying links and using them to manipulate search engine ranking. This is why, if it is discovered that a website is using paid links, such a site is likely to face certain penalties, which may include deranking, de-indexing of the site from search results and reduced traffic.
Low Quality links
Link buying is only profitable when high-quality backlinks are purchased. One main risk of link buying is that you might end up with a low-quality link, especially if you do not choose a reliable vendor.
Low quality links contribute no positive value to the ranking of a website. If anything, they result in deranking, low traffic and generally constitute harm to a website’s SEO.
Paid Backlinks are Usually Short-lived
Buying backlinks can harm a site’s long-term SEO. The links may eventually be broken or related to spam-prone platforms. You might even end up getting a low quality link that will eventually harm your website’s SEO.
This is why it is important to do your research and choose a reputable backlink vendor.
Important factors to consider when purchasing backlinks
If you must buy backlinks, there are a number of factors that you must put into consideration. It is always important to prioritize link quality over link quantity. The first step is to select a reputable link vendor that will only supply high-quality backlinks related to your niche. Here are some important factors to consider when purchasing backlinks:
- Focus on the quality of the link rather than the quantity
- Choose a reputable link building agency or backlink vendor
- Your link should secure a contextual position in the content
- Avoid sitewide links (Links placed in areas where they aren’t likely to be noticed, such as the footer, or sidebar)
- Avoid using websites that have previously been penalized
Diversifying is also important, because link building is not the sole criterion for ranking. Purchased links should instead serve as a supplement to your organic backlink building efforts, and overall SEO strategy. This will result not only in a solid backlink report for your website, but also in a healthy and productive overall SEO strategy.
It is also important that you frequently analyze and monitor your purchased backlinks to ensure that they are not harming your page rather than optimizing it.
Conclusion
Backlinks are one of the ranking factors that search engines consider. It is a major aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is why small businesses, website owners and SEO professionals always strive to acquire and implement high-quality links, either through organic means or by buying them.
Buying backlinks appears to be a less difficult and more effective alternative to organic link building methods. However, search engines prohibit all forms of link buying and frequently penalize sites that are caught doing so.
Also, while link buying can be advantageous, easier, and faster, it can also be detrimental to a website’s SEO. As a result, if you must buy backlinks, it is important that you only buy and utilize high-quality backlinks. Likewise, link buying should be utilized merely as an adjunct to your organic backlink building efforts and overall SEO strategy.
