I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people that both agree and disagree with this post. Link buying is probably the topic you'll struggle to get a lot of SEO agencies to talk about in public. This post is intended to be an open discussion on link buying and our view, as an agency on why it's ultimately, a bad idea.
Why do people buy links?
While there are lots of facets to SEO, when you boil it down to core components, building links (getting other websites to link to you) is what really brings the bread home and gets you rankings. The simple reason why websites engage in link buying is that it works.
Buying links can get you rankings and it can get them pretty quickly. Fact.
What are the risks of link buying?
Or rather, "why do people not buy links"? The first and most obvious reason is that buying links is against Google's Terms of Service.
It's worth remembering that despite what some people think, being included within Google's index is a privilege, not a right, so if you want to be included in their search results in the long-term, then you're going to have to play by their rules.
But what is the actual risk of link buying? In all honesty, despite the fact it's slightly contradictory to my overall point, if done cleverly, the risk of being penalised for link buying is very slim.
Why is this? Well imagine if Google were to actively penalise everyone they thought were buying links. A side effect of this would be that an incentive is created for buying links for your competitors and reporting them to Google! This new "negative link buying" economy would create a lot of "noise" for Google and make the job of returning good, relevant search results even harder.
For this reason, Google actively targets link sellers rather than link buyers. If Google positively identifies a link seller, it is likely that a penalty will be applied, the site will stop ranking well for most terms and the Toolbar PageRank will be nuked. This works as a deterrent, because making a site "worthwhile" as a platform to sell links from, in itself, needs investment, link building and content. The risk therefore is, you can invest into a site with the plan of selling links, only to have it nuked by Google and all value and traffic taken away. So Google's strategy, in this instance works fairly well - give the providers a large risk to their return on investment.
While it's much harder to detect, Google also talks about "devaluing" links from sites that are selling them. This, in my opinion is a brilliant tactic, as it combats the incentive of the link buyer. If you're spending £5,000 per month buying links, but a random sample of these are not passing value, despite them showing PageRank and ranking - it makes it very difficult for link buyers to identify where they are getting value and where they are not.
The ethics of link buying
Businesses will do what is going to provide return, and rightly so. Buying links is not "illegal", or in reality, an ethical issue. It simply comes down to Google's rules. They have built a system, which relies on "natural" linking to help them deliver relevant results. Unnatural and paid links upset their algorithm, have an impact on their results and ultimately pose a direct threat to their revenue: If Google gives poor results, people will stop using it. A drop in market share will result in a drop of Adwords spend, which is still after all of this time, Google's big earner.
Shaun Anderson summed it up perfectly when he said "If buying links was ineffective, it wouldn’t be against Google TOS. Think about that."
Buy links and get out of jail free
Here lies one of the greatest "inequalities" that exists within the search marketing sphere. Some websites have a "get out of jail free" card when it comes to buying links.
As an example, let's say for instance The Guardian were selling text links (oh look, they are), this poses Google a problem. People *expect* to see The Guardian in search results. What happens if Google removed them? What would happen if Google started removing all the big brands (like Moneysupermarket) that openly paid for links?
Maybe not terror and panic on an unprecedented scale, but it would certainly lower the quality of Google's results. While both of these sites are involed in paid links (I don't think I'm outing anything here, it's pretty common knowledge), they both are excellent websites that provide a lot of value to the end user in their own right. If this value was removed from Google's index, people may start to drift elsewhere.
My personal take on this is that if you are a big brand and you have to buy links, you're most likely doing something wrong.
It's worth noting that if you're not a nationally or internationally known brand, you're not going to be treated with kid gloves; you're going to be ceremoniously booted from the search results and at the back of the line of reinclusion.
Why you should not buy links
At Further, we don't recommend any of our clients to buy links. I'm not saying this in the hope that people will be in awe of our glowing whitehat halos, I'm saying it because there is a solid business and return on investment reason for it. I'm also pleased to see that many other large agencies are strongly recommending the same.
Firstly, let's clear something up. You can buy links from "link broker" websites or you can contact individual websites directly. I'm going to ignore the former, as it's just plain stupid. Regardless of what a link broker will claim, nothing stops Google infiltrating these overt link networks and compromising them wholesale.
Let's also say that we will ignore the very outside chance that your entire website will be penalised and we are being "clever" and contacting websites directly, via phone so there's no e-mail trail.
Generally, you will not "buy" a link, you'll actually be "renting" it, that is paying for it on a monthly, or yearly basis. An average link may cost you £50 a month and good links can be £100+ per month. Assuming we buy 100 links at an average price of £60, this means we're immediately outlaying £6,000 per month on retaining our links.
I love it when our competitors do this, I really do. By outlaying £6k a month, they are taking money away that they could be investing in enhancing their existing content, improving the conversion rate of their website, or investing the money in campaigns to create hooks, interest and engagement.
I admit, they will have the rankings in the early days, but SEO is a long-term game. With a good strategy you can invest in campaigns that will grow your links over a period of time, that will be permanent and will themselves slowly generate more links. By creating more value than your competitors, you're also going to have much more social media traction: this means people interested in and sharing your content, 'AKA' more links.
Yes, it will take longer, but if you don't lose your bottle and chip away at it, you can topple the link-buyers with a better proposition. That's when it gets fun, as their immediate response will be "buy more links". Every time you take rankings away from them, they are permanently investing more money acquiring links, eating deeper and deeper into their profit margins.
Still thinking about buying links?
Chief Google anti-spammer Matt Cutts, has recently announced Google are testing new filters to detect link spam and paid links and are actively calling for spam and link buying reports. While I can't comment on the effectiveness of these new filters, I would suggest that maybe this would be a bad time to start buying links.
I won't argue with anyone that says link buying achieves rankings, but when compared to other techniques, it doesn't stack up as a viable long-term SEO strategy that maintains healthy online profits, which is what I assume most businesses are online to achieve!