Would you ever try and bribe a traffic warden to prevent him from giving you a fine?
Pay the hot guy next door to accompany you to the party your ex boyfriend will be attending?
Paying someone to do your household chores and then guilt tripping your partner by saying that you did it all?
Would you ever pay for sex?
With all the above comes a certain question of morality, is it right to buy your way out of situations to make yourself more comfortable and come out on top in doing so? I believe the same could be said for Link Buying.
Fortunately Link Buying is now becoming less common, due to Google’s tight strictness with the buying and selling of links…
Basically Link Buying disregards the quality of links, sources and the long term impact it will have on sites. It violates certain webmaster guidelines made by Google which is seen as the ‘easy’ way to get more link juice flowing to your site. In search engine terms it is almost seen as ‘illegal’ to step ahead in this way.
Google states the “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”.
However, this being said not all paid links violate these Google guidelines, as when done for advertising purposes this is acceptable.
Links are primarily intended to:
- Manipulate PageRank
- Increase site optimization
- A Higher Search Engine Ranking for Your Website
- An Increase in the Informative Nature of Your Website
- Linking Increases the Credibility of Your Website
- Establish Connections within the Internet Community
- Suggest an Affiliation with other Websites
According to Matt Cutts, from Google:
“Tactics like lavishing on reciprocal links; or reciprocal links don’t work as well — let’s try this fad called triangular linking; or let’s try buying links; all these sorts of things. These are not the sort of links that are best for your site. They’re certainly more high risk.”
So the morality issue is down to the individual, do you want to cheat your way to the top with a ‘quickie’ shortcut or really achieve top quality status with the links supporting your website and reputation?
In my opinion you may also lose the satisfaction of ‘Link Building,’ this is the term we use to increase linkage to a website and I feel it is unfair when some companies like Leapfrogg, walk the moral ground and manually work hard to Link Build, building lasting relationships and sourcing the best quality links for our clients, when there are others out there in our industry who use ‘pimp’ sellers to buy cheap links and rush their way to the top to take the credit.
At the end of the day we must remember that paying for links may be a shortcut, but the actual quality of links gained by a website is what is important.
In working the honest way, people will want to link to your site because they wish to without being bought.
Do not treat your website like a prostitute… treat it like your husband /wife… give it the care and attention it deserves and you’ll soon have link juice flowing in and increase rankings and conversions as a result.
Honesty, really is, the best policy!