Paid Links - The Steroids of SEO

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Paid Links - The Steroids of SEO

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I have gotten a lot of questions lately about paid links. Paid links are links from other websites to your website that you pay for. They can range from you sponsoring an event and having the event website link to you, all the way through to using a paid link service where you pay a monthly rental fee to have some blogs or other websites link to you with whatever text you specify. This article is specifically about paid links that you rent per month or year through services specifically designed to sell you links for specifically for SEO value only. Links from sponsorships or other relationships are generally not as harmful.

If you read this blog regularly you should know that links are very important for how high you rank in search engines. The whole structure of Google is based upon using links as a vote for how important your website is. More links equals more votes. Less links means you are less important and likely to rank lower for search terms, all else being equal.

Google does not like paid links. Why? Well, just like we don't want our politicians buying votes, Google does not want you buying votes online (links). If you can buy your way to the top of the rankings, then search results are no longer about how relevant the page is to the search, they are about who has the most money. And Google needs to maintain that high degree of relevance in search results to keep their users happy.

Why Paid Links are the Steroids of SEO:

Paid links help in the short term, but not in the long term. Just like steroids, you can get a short term boost from paid links. But in the long term, if you whole strategy is based on paid links, you do not have a sustainable strategy. You need to keep buying more and more paid links. After a while, it will be hard to buy any more, and the effectiveness of your program will decrease rapidly.
Paid links are against the rules. Google does not like paid links, and if you get caught you will get in trouble. Just like a lot of famous athletes are having their Olympic medals taken away and having to testify in front of Congress, if Google discovers you have purchased links, you can suffer the wrath of the online government (Google).
Paid links make you lazy. Building your company presence on the Internet is hard work. Linkbuilding is especially hard work. It is difficult to create great content that people want to link to, but it is necessary to build the right habits over time to always be creating good and compelling content. If you are just buying links you are not building the right habits. You get lazy and don't build any content. This will really hurt you in the long term.
Your competitors can tell on you. Just like steroids where one athlete can turn in another athlete who is breaking the rules and using steroids, it is possible to try to notify Google that your competitor is cheating and using lots of paid links.

Posted by Mike Volpe on Mon, Feb 25, 2008 @ 10:52 AM

COMMENTS

Hi Mike,

I think your header for this post is a little misleading. At initial glance, it looks like you're saying that paid links is "SEO on steroids" (implying a good thing). I think a better header would've been: "Baseball is to Steroids as Paid Links are to SEO" or something along those lines.

That said, this is a very interesting subject category. I know alot of people who "rent" inbound links to boost their natural rankings.

There is a GREAT post about this issue found on Jonathan Leger's blog (Jon Leger is an internet marketer I follow and respect): <a href="http://www.jonathanleger.com/what-is-really-a-paid-link-anyway/">What is a paid link anyway?</a>

In it, he discusses the possible concerns Google could (should?) have for penalizing link-renters. He argues that link renting/buying is not as black and white as it may seem.

The idea behind link renting/buying is to artificially increase organic rankings, right? So, shouldn't all forms of artificial manipulation be penalized?

For example, many many people distribute articles to article directories purely for SEO purposes. And in fact, many of those people pay others to create those articles and distribute them. So, Jonathan argues, shouldn't those be considered paid links? He gives many other examples and I would recommend reading the post further if you're interested.

posted on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 11:16 AM by Torque Screwdriver

The link from Torque Screwdriver didn't work for me. This did:
http://www.jonathanleger.com/what-is-really-a-paid-link-anyway/

posted on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 12:08 PM by Christi Wharton

Yes, I realized I mis-entered that after I submitted the comment. thanks for the correction ;0)

posted on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 12:27 PM by Torque Screwdriver

I think that paid links are work so well

posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 12:21 AM by Yiwu

I agree that paid links do not have that much weightage as other aspects of SEO but getting good, relevant and reputed links always boosts the rankings.

posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7:08 AM by Navtej Kohli

I use paid links on some other websites and it's seemed to work very well. Don't forget that while Google is god, there are other search engines out there. My paid links tend to work VERY well in yahoo and for some of my sites, yahoo is my biggest traffic generator. And it's not like I'm not getting any love from Google. I get good rankings from Google for several words for one site in particular and the only thing I did was buy links. As long as you understand the risks associated with it (ie, Google could devalue it overnight). It's probably a good idea to mix several sources of inbound links to be safe.

posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 9:48 AM by Torque Screwdriver

report paid links with Webmaster tools ....
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en

posted on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 5:17 PM by Todd Lucier

Paid links work on time to time basis. Want further strategies or just coffee talk about marketing? Come to my site http://www.squidoo.com/onlinemarketguide