Buying links for your website: hit or miss?

Buying links is exactly what it sounds like—paying other websites to include links to your website. These links can be in the form of text links, images, or other hyperlinks. The goal is to increase the total number of links pointing to your site, which search engines like Google may see as a sign of authority. The idea is that if more sources reference your page, it must have something interesting to say. Or does it?

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The quality among different sellers varies. A few years ago, we often encountered websites receiving hundreds of links from a multitude of junk sites containing nothing but a wall of links. These were managed by organisations or individuals selling the links for money. Nowadays, these sites are flagged by search engines, and anyone getting links from them risks being penalised.

Buying links without clearly marking them violates Google's guidelines for SEO. Google continuously works to improve algorithms to identify and penalise sites that break these guidelines. The consequence can be a lower ranking or even removal from search results. In this article, we list tools that can help you with SEO. Google Search Console allows you to inspect the links to your site and provides warnings if something looks suspicious.

The links for sale are often low-quality and come from sites with a poor reputation or are flagged as spam. This can damage your site's reputation and authority.

Even though purchased links might provide temporary results, they are rarely a long-term strategy for SEO success. Google continues to get better at detecting and ignoring purchased links. Search Generative Experience is something we believe will make relevant content even more beneficial in the future.

We want to raise a warning: It's not uncommon for SEO agencies to have a so-called PBN (private blog network), a network of purchased blogs on various topics. From these, they can then add more credible links to their clients. These can boost rankings, but once the collaboration ends, these links disappear. Instead, invest in your website with the tips below:

The fact that a transaction takes place in connection with a link does not automatically make it bad. If you pay for an ad on a site, it does not violate Google's guidelines. These should be marked with rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” to tell search engines not to consider these for link authority.

Links continue to impact a website’s authority and traffic. Instead of buying links, here are three tips:

Create valuable content for visitors: Create high-quality, relevant content that others will link to organically. Do you have graphics or information that might be interesting to others?

Guest posts: Write guest posts on other high-quality websites in your industry and include links to your site when relevant.

Build relationships: The easiest way to find links is to review previous collaborations and whether you get a link where you are already mentioned. Are there other parties where you can mutually benefit from linking to each other?

Another warning: The number of links is a fun number to see go up over time, but it is rarely, if ever, more important than the content of the page. Focus on very low-hanging fruit to not miss the opportunities right in front of you, but do not spend an unreasonable amount of time and resources on link building. In this article, we have listed how an SEO consultant usually thinks about KPIs.

Buying links may seem like a quick fix to improve your website’s ranking, but it is a risky strategy that all too often has negative consequences. Instead, you should focus on attracting organic and high-quality links by offering valuable content and building relationships with others in your industry. It is a more sustainable and long-term strategy for success in search results.