STOP Buying Back Links

Everyone knows that it’s essential to build back links to increase a site’s rankings. However, it can be incredibly difficult for some sites to build links. They run into many issues such as not enough time, competitive industry, and locating high quality sites. This forces sites to turn to other methods and in some cases this means buying back links.

A recent scenario that was encountered involved a travel related website looking to build links to their site. The issue that arose was the sites that were reached out to were asking for some type of payment for an article. If every site asked for somewhere between $100-200 for a blog post a site can expect to be paying a few thousand dollars each month. For many websites this is not in their budget and also hard to justify. Unfortunately, many sites will resort to paying for these articles since they feel this is the only way they can build new links.

Why Avoid Paying for Links

Not only does it get pricey paying for links, it also violates Google’s Guidelines. Google clearly states that buying or selling links to help influence PageRank is a big no-no. Now some sites understand it’s against the guidelines to do this, yet do so anyways. Other sites are unaware of Google’s Guidelines and are selling links in the hope to supplement their site’s income.

Google offers a submission form that allows users to report sites that are participating in buying and selling links. Now it is hard to determine how many of these sites end up penalized by Google. The search engine has always tried to emphasize quality back links and have begun penalizing more sites that do not participate in white hat practices. With that being said, it’s very possible that any sites buying links can face penalties. Sites need to take this into consideration now, and avoid purchasing links for future penalties.

Other Back linking Options

So what other options are there to build back links if everyone wants some type of payment? The first step is to create excellent content that users find helpful, entertaining, and intriguing. This is the kind of content that will build organic back links. Now for many sites it’s not as easy as ‘build some content, and watch the links roll in’. They need to get this content in front of people. This means reaching out to blogs that have similar content as your own and opening dialogue. Entice these sites into linking to your new content. You may run into sites that ask for payment, this is where you can show your Google knowledge and reference them to Google’s Guidelines. Move on if sites still want payment, these are sites you do not want to be working with.

In conclusion, it’s important to build back links, yet you should always be focusing on high quality, relevant sites. Don’t resort to purchasing links, it may come back to haunt you later. By producing quality content and reaching out to sites related to yours, you can build quality links to help increase your rankings.