Witness an Increase in your ROI
Unlock higher rankings, quality traffic, and amplified conversions through tailored award-winning SEO strategies.
Google’s PageRank (PR) algorithm uses backlinks to rank content for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Therefore, backlinks should form an important part of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy.
Building backlinks involves time and effort, however. And sometimes, people may resort to buying backlinks. But is it a good idea to buy backlinks in exchange for money? Or does it go against Google’s guidelines? Let’s find out.
Why it’s dangerous to buy backlinks
Buying backlinks to boost SEO is not recommended if you own a website. Though such links pass PageRank, Google considers it a backlinks link scheme. It considers paid backlinks as a violation of its Webmaster guidelines.
One of two things can happen when Google believes your links are paid:
- Discounting links: Google algorithms discount the paid links rendering them useless to your search engine rankings.
- Penalty: If Google thinks that you’re attempting to manipulate ranking by artificially inflating your backlink profile (as a Black Hat SEO tactic), it can penalize your website. The penalty may result in the removal of the website from Google’s search index.
This is what Google webmaster guidelines say about paid links: “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.”
Your links either have no impact or negatively impact your ranking prospects. It is important to focus on creating great content and acquiring natural backlinks from authoritative websites related to your niche. Such backlinks are more reliable and offer long-term benefits for improving SEO.
Why do people still purchase backlinks?
A poll conducted on Twitter by Barry Schwartz (the original poll was posted by Tim Soulo from Ahrefs) asked people if they would pay money to buy SEO backlinks in 2022 and found that 42.5% said they wouldn’t pay money to buy links. And 37.1% said they would still pay money to get paid links for their content.
Moreover, in 2017, Gary Illyes from Google made it clear that buying links from websites that sell guest blog posts is like “literally throwing money out of the window,”. Google doesn’t count those links. He added that they are doing a great job at ignoring these paid links and don’t penalize them as harshly
So, why do people still buy backlinks when they are useless?
The answer is simple. It helps with Google’s EEAT (Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness) formula. It improves ranking and boosts traffic; many people often get away with that (paid links).
What is the price of links?
Many websites sell link packages for a few bucks. These come with keywords, 70+ DR (Domain Rating), and premium indexing.
However, most SEOs understand that this doesn’t improve the ranking of their websites, and that is why they go for either Niche Edits or Paid Guest Posts. In Niche Edits, you simply ask a site owner to add a link to an existing page on their website and offer a fee. It could be anything between $300-400.
The Paid Guest Post is rather cheap. You simply write an article containing links to your website, and you pay another prominent website owner a fee to publish it. It could cost you around $75 on average.
What are the prices for specialized edits?
Specialized edits (aka niche edits or link insertions) are a creative way to add more traffic to your website, and the safest way to do this is to find reliable websites with good domain authority and directly communicate with them to have a link placed on the older web pages. A web post that has been live for more than six months will be a more suitable bet for you.
The pricing for specialized/niche edit services varies from one provider to another. It depends on the provider, the quality of the links, and the number of links required. It could be anywhere between a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per link.
On average, many providers offer link packages at $361.44, as per an Ahrefs survey conducted on 450 such sites. It all depends on the providers, the domain rating of the linking websites, and the niche or industry in which the links are being placed.
What is the cost of paid guest posts?
Paid Guest Posts are another way to achieve the desired results without the need to buy quality backlinks. It’s a preferred backlinks link scheme employed by many SEO specialists.
The costs of paid guest posts are less than Niche Edits and depend on various factors such as the website’s age, niche, domain authority, number of internal links in your guest post, keyword density, and sometimes even the word count. Some providers charge a flat fee per post without any limitations.
The typical cost for a high-quality paid guest post on a mid-sized website starts at $50 to $200. At the same time, a large and authoritative site can range from $200 to $1,000. However, if you decide to pay for guest posting services, ensure that the website and provider are legitimate and comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Why are links so expensive?
Good SEO backlinks are always in demand. Even after Google emphasized not to use them, plenty continue to do so. Google has a strict policy on paid links: “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links, exchanging goods or services for links, sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link” are tactics that are considered spam.
Besides, cloaking, hidden links and texts, keyword stuffing, and doorways are also heavily monitored by Google. It’s a risky business not only for the customers but for the providers as well.
Buying SEO backlinks has benefits as well. It brings traffic and boosts PR while many e-commerce websites have benefited heavily by selling more merchandise and gaining popularity. And this is perhaps the main reason why backlinks are in great demand and also quite expensive.
How to Create Safe Links?
Google sees paid links as spam and penalizes your websites, with the worst penalty resulting in the downgrade of your PR. You should look for a safe way to build links and there are two ways to go about that:
- Create great content that would encourage other websites to reference you, as many do with Wikipedia or news websites. The secret sauce is being legitimate so that people feel confident knowing that what they read is true. It is recommended to follow EEAT.
- Do some outreach to earn links. Outreach is similar to advertising and your good content will only attract traffic if people know about it. It is not going to sell itself. Proactively do some outreach and find websites to backlink your posts and pages.
Is the website legitimate?
Outreach strategy requires due diligence and research-backed decision-making. The website you want to backlink your posts has to be legitimate. But more importantly, it has to be relevant to your audience. So do some research before reaching out to a website owner.
Find out if the website is legitimate. It might not be easy but look for clues and references. The logo, website design, and content itself can tell if the site is legitimate.
Check if there are links embedded within the text and if it has legitimate authorship, meaning people writing for the site are legitimate. If there is a bio available with contact details and socials mentioned, they’re mostly legitimate.
If it doesn’t seem legitimate and doesn’t prompt confidence, it’s probably not worth reaching out to for a backlink-building exercise.
Is there consistent search traffic?
Another way to choose a good website to extend your outreach to is to see if it gets some good traffic. If it is getting adequate traffic, it means that Google considers it valuable.
To check if a website has good traffic for backlinking outreach, you can use a tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze the website’s organic search traffic and domain authority. A website with high domain authority and a healthy amount of organic search traffic indicates that it is a reputable website that can provide valuable backlinks.
You can look at the website’s Alexa traffic rank or use other analytics tools to check the website’s monthly traffic and user engagement levels. You can also research the website’s niche and target audience to ensure that it aligns with your goals and objectives for backlinking outreach. If a website has a severe drop in monthly traffic due to Google’s Core Update in August 2018, you should avoid it for any backlinking, paid or otherwise.
Is the site selling links?
Another thing to note before any outreach is if the site is selling links. Google discourages open paid link selling and penalizes the websites undertaking such activities. It is not worth reaching out for a backlink because a Google penalty will render it futile even if you get a backlink from the website.
Checking if the website is selling links is rather easy. You can go through some of their recent posts and find the links they have used. If the anchor texts have oddly placed links with fancy keywords, it sells links.
Many website-checking platforms also present a report on outgoing links on a webpage, so be sure to use that as well. It will instantly tell you all the outgoing links, and you can decide for yourself.
Has the website purchased links?
Before contacting a website for backlinking, you must also find out if the website is itself buying links. Selling and buying of links is frowned upon by Google. It will penalize them eventually, and your whole effort would be a waste.
To check if a website is buying links, you can see how the traffic is coming to the website. If you suspect that the website you want to outreach is using bought links to generate traffic, you can analyze the traffic sources using a tool such as Google Analytics. Look for an unusually high number of referral links, especially from low-quality or spam filled websites unrelated to the website’s niche.
You can also analyze the anchor text used in the backlinks, as overuse of exact-match anchor text may indicate that the backlinks are unnatural. However, you should also remember that not all backlinks from paid sources are necessarily low-quality, so don’t make assumptions based on just traffic sources.
Are you suggesting a useful link?
Another best practice is to assess what you’re offering while you outreach and ascertain if the website is a good match for your content(s) and your niche.
Two things to do here:
- Create useful and unique content
- Find contextual pitching opportunities
For any website to backlink to your content, you must create valuable content that goes with the theme of the website you are trying to outreach. Your content must be unique and offer value otherwise, it won’t work.
Once that is achieved, you must find good pitching opportunities. Websites posting similar content could use your content as backlinks. If your content is unique, more people would like to point to your website via backlinks, so focus on that.
Conclusion
SEO backlinks are an important factor in achieving higher search engine rankings. But it is crucial to understand that when you buy backlinks, it is not a sustainable or effective strategy. It can result in penalties and decrease search engine rankings since it goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Your focus should be on creating valuable and engaging content that naturally attracts high-quality backlinks from reputable websites. Hence, it’s recommended to invest in white-hat SEO techniques and build relationships with other websites in the same niche, which will help you generate organic backlinks, as buying backlinks could potentially harm your web domain authority and PR.
