How Buying Links Can Hurt Your Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing links provide many sites and entrepreneurs the opportunity to drive traffic, and hopefully clients, to their homepage. As with most business needs, sites and services have sprung up with a simple and efficient way to not only increase your traffic but also your ratings on Google, making you easier to find for potential customers. Thousands of these sites, including Fiverr, LinksExperts, and ProlinkHQ only ask for small sums to multiply your online potential.
But these types of marketing are not a wise way to strategize for revenue. It is, however, a great way to get kicked clean out of search engines and their results. No online presence equals limited accessibility for your customers. Google is especially particular about removing any sites that buy badly reputed links or even a unrealistic number of back links. Even paying for distribution of your articles is frowned upon. In recent years, Google has even changed the language in its Webmaster Guidelines to indicate that paid links most likely or probably won’t affect your web rankings. Various SEO examiners ran experiments indicate that yes, having a lot of paid links compared to non-paid links, will shatter your site standings on Google. Their algorithms, among other search engines, are so powerful and adaptable that they recognize link-farm sites and quickly subtract them from search results.
Why don’t Google and other search engines simply kick out sites participating in link buying and bad marketing mojo networks? Well, think about it. How easy would it be to buy links for a competitor and get them axed? With that in mind, and knowing how dishonest companies are willing to be for business, punishing the sites becomes complicated for Google.
The entire point of Google search rankings is to let your site’s popularity organically fluctuate. Buying links is cheating, plain and simple. No matter how appealing shelling out a few bucks to shortcut good old fashion SEO and social media interactions is, it’s just not worth the risk in the long run.
Even as SEO and online marketing have morphed over the years, so have the eligibility of the links Google takes into account. Not only do they look for an overflow of traffic, but they also look at the quality of the inbound links. If it’s unrelated, they’ll notice. If clickers have no history of buying your type of goods, they’ll notice. If a badly-reputed network sneezes in your site’s direction, they’ll notice.
Best protocol? Just don’t buy links. Use common sense and honest inbound marketing procedures. Seek out occasions to offer your goods or swap links with related contacts. Guest blog or use other social media to get the word out. In this way you’ll naturally generate leads and customers, and sustain innocent SEO tactics.
