Buying Backlinks For SEO: Yes, This Is Still A Thing - Search Engine Journal

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It wasn’t long from the time when search engine optimizers first realized the important role backlinks played in search rankings until some enterprising soul came up with the idea of selling links.

Of course, it wasn’t long before bad actors started abusing it, just like nearly every other ranking hack in SEO. And Google, doing what Google does, began cracking down on the process.

There’s not much in the way of a gray area regarding Google’s position on the issue.

The first bullet point in Google’s Webmaster Guide about link schemes states that buying or selling links that pass PageRank will negatively impact your site’s ranking. This includes “…exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links, exchanging goods or services for links, or sending someone a ‘free’ product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.”

And as good, white hat SEOs, of course, none of us would ever dream of doing such a thing. Except a lot of sites still do. It’s not openly discussed in our field, but the practice is still alive.

This, of course, raises some questions. Namely, what’s the benefit of paying for links? And is it worth the risk?

In this piece, we’ll answer these questions and take a closer look at the buying and selling of links.

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