Many of our clients ask us about buying links to boost their SEO. It’s a known fact that having links to your own site from other sources is a good way of building credibility in the eyes of search engines but where is the line, and what happens if you cross it?

Quite often when analysing our clients’ sites, we perform backlink analysis. This tells us who is linking to the site, where from and how often. From this analysis we can very quickly tell who’s been paying for links and how big a problem it could be causing if those links are considered toxic. See here for a good post on the subject -> How Link Detoxing Can Save Your Site’s SEO.

From a search engine’s perspective, a website with credible links is going to be more worthy than a site with none. Note the use of the word ‘credible’. If your peers, competition or other sites who’s content is relative to your business have links to your site on their own sites, this builds a picture of your authority in that space. If you’re in with the in-crowd, you’re more likely to be ranked higher for related search terms.

However, buying a ton of links from unscrupulous link building providers has the opposite effect. If you’ve paid for links to be created on third party services for the purposes of increasing the volume of links to your site, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and quite possibly retirement from search engine rankings entirely. It has been known for sites participating in this ‘black hat’ practice to be wiped off search indexes entirely.

This means you could  literally disappear from the internet.

 

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We like Yoast, he’s the author of the very popular Yoast plugin for WordPress, which we install and configure as standard in our hosted WordPress build.

Here he gives some great advice about buying backlinks to boost your SEO…..