Why Buying Links is NOT a Good SEO Practice

Link building is not an easy task for SEO’s that its sounds easy to hear. But one truth is that so many SEO’s give promise that they will get thousands of link in several days; but this link mostly they buy from other sites. Of course buying links will get you number of good amount of links faster than natural link building. But in reality this is not a good idea because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

This is also true that Google wouldn’t penalize your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links, wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.

For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. You should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only  by…

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute; or
  
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
  

If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.