Is it ok to buy links?
First off, why buy links? Links are the primary indicator of a site’s popularity. One-way links from high-traffic context-related sites are particularly valuable. The more links you have, the nearer you get to the top of the engine.
Google encourages users to report paid links, as some kinds of paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines. However, Google doesn’t ban paid link activity entirely, and seems to accept that is “a normal part of the economy of the web”, when done properly. And ‘properly’ means making sure Google knows this is a commercial relationship:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you’re retaining an agency to buy links for your site, you must make sure that these guidelines are adhered to, or your site will be regarded as part of a spam network. Once Google has identified a spam site, it’s relatively easy to identify all the back-linked sites, and to penalise them accordingly.
So, it’s ok to buy links, as long as you do it properly, but if you attempt to pass PageRank - i.e., not identifying that inbound links to your site are part of a commercial relationship, you may be Google-slapped.
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