Should you still take advantage of the opportunity to buy backlinks if search engines are now better at identifying manipulation? This is the contentious subject that fuels many strategic conversations among webmasters, SEO experts, and business owners. The answer is a little different: how you define quality in this process, who you share this burden with, and your approach all play a major role. One of the most time-consuming, manual aspects of SEO has always been building links.
Obtaining natural citations from reputable websites may require weeks of writing, networking, and follow-up. It should not be surprising that many companies believe purchasing backlinks is a simple way to hasten the growth of core authority.
Why wait months for editors to discover and mention your website when a single purchase can put you in front of a highly reputable, popular website almost instantly? As long as it is done responsibly, buying backlinks is only a strategic investment and is not intrinsically against best practices. Search engine algorithms can easily distinguish between an invasive, spammy pure link farm and a real, editorially placed, highly relevant reference on a reputable website.
Search engines will take into account the anchor text’s relevance context diversity, the connecting domains’ PageRank, and topical relevancy. Your rankings, referral traffic, and company reputation are much more likely to be impacted by a backlink from your publisher, blog, or respectable authority site than by one from a de-indexed, unreliable website that receives no traffic particularly aimed at the home page. Most campaigns fail when marketers don’t quickly and fully research their target providers.
Buying backlinks without thinking is definitely a common mistake. If Google’s spam filter is updated to crack down on link schemes, its algorithms can quickly detect unnatural link growth when a large number of low-cost links arise out of nowhere from unrelated, low-authority domains. In addition to spam issues, if a company simply buys thousands of backlinks from a bulk supplier without previously doing extensive research, the intended outcomes may often be transient.
If you’re truly thinking about buying backlinks, there are a few broad rules that will help you differentiate between smart planning and blind gambling. Relevance should take precedence over number; ten backlinks to relevant content are far more significant than a thousand on irrelevant pages. Ask directly about placement, cloaking, and editorial penalties.
Use a range of naturally occurring anchor text rather than a bunch of the same keywords. Additionally, ask for any operational statistics up front, such as PA/DA, spam scores, incoming links, organic traffic numbers, and more. Buying backlinks is a difficult undertaking. When seen as a thoughtful, well-researched investment rather than a band-aid fix, it can greatly raise a site’s authority profile. If applied carelessly, it diminishes the worth of years of work. Slow and steady wins the race.
