Buying links - why would you do it?

Marketing
1

I’m curious about why people would risk buying links and how they go about making sure that the links they’ve paid for can’t be identified by Google.

I’ve seen a bunch of WTB or WTS links threads on various forums but it must be quite hard to sort out the good prospects from the bad and the liars. Does anyone have experience of buying links? Did it work? Have you had any get devalued? How did you agree prices, what’s the most common way to get ripped off?

It seems like it coud be a very expensive and risky way to try to improve rankings.

2

I’ve never tried it, but a friend of my boss’ did it with his company.

Their main business is in the money sector, so banking and investment kind of stuff. They bought a ton of links and effectively spammed their links on thousands of irrelevant sites. It was very successful for them at the time and they got a ton of leads through, even on irrelevant searches like “cheap nokia phones”. Effectively, they pushed links on link farms and high PR sites and started building their own farms for their micro-sites. This was all done by one man, who didn’t stick around long after this work was done.

All was well, until the Panda update hit them, hard. Over the next financial year they’re set to lose out on around £1M in deals as the drop in traffic and rankings has forced a number of firms to pull out and go elsewhere. The harsh part of this is that people will now be losing their jobs, primarily in the IT and Marketing departments.

3

Webmasters probably feel the need to buy links to increase their website’s visibility on the search engines.

Good thing Panda update came as the websites with lesser authority even beat those reputable ones because of their tactic of buying links.

I don’t want to try it as we focus more on long-term and not short-term. If you get hit by a penalty, your site rankings will drop big time.

4

You both think that using paid for links is a short term strategy?

In the same way that good link building is better aimed at quality prospects than high volume crap, can’t paid for links also be good quality and long term?

Pate3ck, I don’t think you can be hurt for buying links, it’s the site selling the links that gets the penalty.

5

I did buy a total of 2000 forum profile back-links for one of my sites. I did not really see great result since forum profile links are hard to get found and indexed. I use to check some of the keywords that I was trying to target. Some of them were in 4th, 5th, and 6th page of Google. But, after a while my ranking was gone and when I checked a penalty tool, it is reported that my site has a severe penalty.

Since my ranking was gone I had to believe it. I would say the problem with paid links is you’ll always get ranked very well in the short run, but you will probably end up getting caught which is always going to be devastated .