Paid links are used to advertise one website on another site. Webmasters are paid to include a link in their site that will direct visitors to the advertiser’s website.
Search engine optimization logic tells us that the more links there are to your site, the better your site ranking will be. Yet it is intriguing how the biggest search engines, including Google, disagree with the practice of having paid links.
What can paid links do for you?
Paid links can give you an opportunity to artificially create a lot of backlinks to your website. This could create buzz and word of mouth, especially if you are wise in choosing the sites you want to be linked from.
Review the content of the site.
The more relevant the content is, the more value you get for your money. Go a step further and determine if the ones that view this site are the same market you want to advertise your company or product to, so that there is less advertising wastage.
Your background check should not stop with the site that offers you link space. It is advisable to check where else this site is linked to and linked from. This extra effort will protect your site from sites that could be objectionable to your target market.
How can paid links harm your campaign?
Google has announced its disapproval of paid-link sites, even going as far as penalising webmasters both for buying and selling links. Moreover, Google has now developed an algorithm that detects cleverly hidden paid links, allowing them to legally exclude both the selling site and the buying site from the search index.
Although purchasing a lot of links can allow you to spread yourself all over the web, there is a high risk that the sites you pay have contents that are irrelevant to your site. This is why Google does not approve of paid links. Links that appear on sites whose content is irrelevant to them can affect the search quality.
Moreover, sites with bad content could ruin your company and destroy your credibility when they come up as search hits.
Can your paid links be ethical?
By taking action against paid sites, search engines are actually protecting the advertisers’ interests. They want to make sure that your site and all sites associated to yours remain relevant to your market when they search for you.
There is currently and has been for a while a massive debate about the ethics of paid links and whether or not Google is right or wrong to penalize paid links.
So what do you do? Pay for links or not?
Until its said in black and white that paid links are bad, its still going to happen, people are going to keep paying for links because its advertising.
I personally would not pay for links with a view to boostng PR. Thats a given.
The internet is a big library so its all about relevance of content between certain web sites so paying for a link on a Bingo related site for example back to my web design site just does not make sense…..however…..advertising logic dictates that well, even bingo people need web sites so why should my site be penalised because I am trying to attract bingo users to my web design site.
There are literally thousands of similar arguments!
In general, until its stated that YES, paying for links is illegal, I think a certain level of caution should be made when paying for links and I would ask myself these questions before doing so:
Is the site relevant to my site?
What is my reason for paying for the link?
Is it blatantly obvious its a paid link?
Is the link being sold by a link Agency?
Again, excericse caution when paying for links, becasue it “could” get you in trouble….or it “could not”.
