The Pros and Cons of Buying Links

I received an e-mail this week from a site that wanted to sell me a link. For $300, the owner would link to my site from his site. The e-mail explained that his site had a high PageRank, and that by buying a link from him I would see my own site's search ranking improve. Sounds logical, but is this really a good idea?

Some sites also offer paid advertisements in the form of a link. They call them sponsorships. So when is a paid link a good idea and when is a paid link a bad idea? When have you bought a link that will get you in hot water with the search engines and when have you bought a link that the search engines don't care you paid for?

Sadly, there is no perfect answer, but there are some guidelines that make sense to follow anytime you are considering buying links. I've established my position as a conservative white hat link builder and buyer, so you may not like what follows, but it's worked for me for many years, and I've yet to have any client's site be banned or have its ranking reduced.

Rules for Buying Links

First , if you want to buy links because you want to improve your search rank, don't. It's that simple. Do not buy links for search rank. I cannot say it any simpler than that. Why? Because if you do, the engines reserve the right to penalize you for it. Google considers buying text links for ranking purposes to be a violation of its quality guidelines. Don't believe it? Read this: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ . Play that game with your eyes wide open, or don't play it at all.

Second , think of paid links as advertising to the readers of the site where the link will reside. Nothing more, nothing less. Forget rankings. Is the site a logical place where the readers who encounter your link might be inclined to click on it? Your site sells plumbing tools? Then don't buy a link here . Buy one here .

Third , while you will hear stories or anecdotes about how someone improved his or her rankings by buying links, is the risk of being banned by the search engines worth the potential for improved rankings?

I suppose if your site is new and has no chance of ranking well naturally for a highly competitive search category, then you could argue you have little to lose if your site is banned by the search engines. Either way you're invisible to searchers. But if you have a site that has been around a while or which has performed well for you in the rankings, remember these two simple known facts.

1. You cannot know if your rankings really will improve until you buy the links, which means you assume all the risk of the known penalty with no knowledge of the outcome or reward.
2. You cannot know if any improvement will last and impact your bottom line to a high enough degree to offset the loss to your bottom line should your site vanish completely.

I'm not saying don't buy links. I'm saying you need to be honest with yourself about your intent. Advertising via links is smart business. Chasing rank isn't.