You may have heard of the practice of purchase backlinks, but you may be unsure if you should engage in it.
Purchasing “cheap” backlinks in bulk from shady sources is a Black Hat SEO strategy – a method of deceiving or misleading Google and other search engines so that your website ranks higher than it should.
You’re not performing off-page SEO correctly if you buy backlinks for SEO and have little to no control over where the backlinks are put or what sort of content your backlink appears in.
It’s a little different if you pay for a service that helps you gain visibility, brand recognition, and backlinks.
In general, the easier it is to buy a backlink, the less valuable it is.
This is since Google and other search engines do not want to encourage spamming activity. On the other hand, backlinks that are difficult to obtain, such as those from government and university websites, are worth a lot more since they are more difficult to manipulate.
Why you should avoid purchasing spammy backlinks
Even if it no longer works, it is still feasible to purchase backlinks in bulk at ridiculously low costs. Have you seen this commercial before? Or maybe something similar?
This is the essence of black hat SEO. If there was ever a link-building or SEO technique to completely avoid, this is it. These services typically rely on link farms or low-quality “news” websites that connect to as many services as feasible.
The information on these websites is frequently nonsense, and the links themselves are frequently worthless.
Google’s position on Link Buying
Google expressly prohibits the exchange of money for connections.
The lesson should be that the more direct and evident a monetary exchange in exchange for a connection is, the less natural it is. The less natural it appears; the more likely Google will penalize it. The reason Google uses “can” rather than “will” is that certain link-building techniques, although including the exchange of money, do not fall into the same spammy category as some paid-for link schemes.
