Why Many Purchased Links are Worthless
In many of the popular webmaster related forums you can usually find a section on link sales. Yes, backlinks are the holy grail of SEO these days, but did you know that many of these paid links are absolutely worthless? Let me explain in more detail…
Let’s face it, Google is a master at analyzing data. From Google analytics to their own algorithm, Google does a pretty darn good job at crunching the number and detailing data. And part of their technology is devoted to identifying paid links. How does Google do it? Of course that is open to debate, but let me share some of my opinions and you make your own call.
I’ve seen it dozens of times in forums, a PR 5 or PR 6 for sale. Most of the time the seller says something like “only ten links will be sold.” This is your first clue that they are worthless links and you should avoid buying them. Why? Google can easily compare cached pages. You know, the history of the page so to speak. For years that page may have sat there with few outbound links on it then all of a sudden ten outbound links magically appear. This sends up a red flag and those links are simply devalued in most cases. Those that bought the links essentially paid for a link for some PR juice but in return get nothing.
Link placement is always a factor. Think of a page in sections when you look at it. You generally have a header, left side bar, right sidebar, the footer, and the body (where the content is). Outbound links in the footer tend to carry little value, especially if many are added all at once. The most valuable area of the page is obviously the body, where the real content is.
I could go into more details regarding paid links and placement, but that is beyond the scope of this post. My main goal is to educate the readers here and to save them money. If you are buying links from webmaster forums, consider the impact of 5, 10, or even 20 links appearing all at once. After a little thought, come to your own conclusion.
In the end it is the natural links that provide the best SEO benefit. This is why Matt Cutts specifically addresses this over and over. And to be quite honest, Google is very good at discarding paid links. Those with a paid link budget can actually gain greater SEO benefits by instead using that money to add the features and content that will make their site stand out from the rest.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Thanks for this outline. I didn’t know exactly how Google could identify such links. But I suspected that it could suss them out somehow. Google is very smart already, and getting smarter all the time.
That’s why it’s always better to just do things by the book. Keep adding good content, and build backlinks naturally.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:09 am
I agree with you on this specific circumstance, but you should also mention the distinction between someone selling some links, and the leading paid links such as the Yahoo! directory and BOTW. These specific paid links are very valuable for your site in the search engines view.