Paid Text Links - Why Buying Them Is Part Of Marketing Your Website Right Now
Rants, SEM General August 2nd. 2007, 3:08pm
Google is currently the only search engine who will try and penalize websites that sell paid link advertising or try and penalize websites who buy the links. Currently the only way a website gets penalized for buying them is Google will take the paid link that they found or that was reported to them and devalue it. In other words it will not carry hardly any weight what so ever for the website that bough the link. It will not pass for PR and basically becomes a no follow link. They will not do anything with your current spot on the SERP’s for buying text links like they do for keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc. In the long run if they found hundreds of links that you bought from high PR sites then that could have an effect on your overall ranking since we all know that one way links are currently a very big factor in achieving higher rankings with Google.
In the past buying banner space was very popular for driving traffic to your website in hopes of increased sales and conversions. This can still hold true depending on where you are buying the banner space from and Google does not care that you buy banner space to advertise your website with. The reason why they are trying so hard to stop or shall I say slow down the text link buying is the simple fact that they were dumb enough to make it such a big deal in there algorithm and how it truly does effect your ranking on the SERP’s. John Chow had achieved the number one spot on Google for the term “make money online”. He did this with his link back campaign where anyone who had reviewed his blog was asked to use terms similar to that one to see where he would rank. Well low and behold he go the number one spot and made it public. Google then banned him not only for that keyword, but also for his own name.
That is not buying text links, that is finding a flaw with the Google algorithm and exploiting it to the fullest to prove a point. Of course you would get banned for something like that because it was on a large scale and then you bragged about it. Well to this day one way links with your keywords as the anchor text hold a lot of value with Google. If you were buying banner space, Google adwords or other forms of online marketing you have to spend money. Well it holds true for text links, you have to spend the money if you want your link to get out on the internet faster. In today’s business world company’s want to see there profits go up faster then you could imagine. You tell some companies to start writing good content for a blog that they do not even really need and in 3-6 months you should start to see the results. Those results being more links to there website by people talking about the article and so fourth. Or you could tell them spend this much a month and you will have your links over this many websites by the next few days as well as paid directory listings. Yep, the check will be written and the link buying will begin. In today’s market they want results and they want them now, not in 6 months. Yes I understand that search engine marketing takes time and patience, however if you could buy up links to boost your link count, having great one way links and drive some more traffic to the site then why not.
Buying a text link from a website that is no where near in the industry as you or that will have Viagra, porn, gambling links is a sure way to get caught by the Google radar. Buy links from sites that are in the same or relative to your industry and that do not support the crap links from the above listed niches and you will be fine. If the website title’s the spot as “paid links” or “advertiser links” then you might want to refrain from buying that link as Google could possibly see this and detect it as a paid link even if it is an image. Google is not stupid we all know this by now.
Purchasing advertising space has been around the internet before Google was even born out of that garage. You can still go out and buy up all the directory listings you want and they will not count them as paid links since the directories have to actually read, review and then post each submission. Directories claim you are paying for the “review” of your submission, yea and once again what a load of crap. Seriously though, how many directories out there will deny a listing as long as it is not related to the typical viagra/porn/gambling spam and not stuffed with keywords. You can buy up hundreds of these paid directory listings and be just fine, it will boost your link count and in return your website reputation and PR. Directories to me are nothing more then paid links, they just come with a short description and are on a website that nobody will ever really look on. For Google, it was there screw up in having one way links be such a strong influence on there algorithm and where we rank for our keywords. I know they want websites to use the nofollow tag on the paid links, but then who would really spend that much money on those links since they will carry very little weight with Google? They messed up and are now trying to stop the wave of paid text links that websites are buying to improve there rankings. Ok my rant is over, what is your take on this matter?
