May 16th, 2010 by Susie

There is a debate as to whether buying links for your website is ethical. Popular search engines will sometimes frown upon it and Google in particular have advised us that they are looking into measures to identify which links are paid for in terms of SEO, but they do not dismiss all paid for links entirely. The problem that search engines are facing today is that a lot of companies that sell links are big brands and important and popular websites. Strong and reputable news pages, for instance, have been known to sell links and with some of these sites being amongst the most popular searches, can search engines afford to ban them from their results entirely?

The main reason that a company will buy a link is to increase its search ranking. If you buy a link then the chances are that you will appear within a lot of search results pages and you may get to the top of your ranking quickly. The reality however, is that you are unlikely to stay there for the duration and there is the risk that the link or website could be banned or penalised by the search engine. Buying links can be beneficial for directory purposes for instance but these are likely to be cluttered with a lot of other paid links too.

There are many more arguments as to why companies should not buy links as there are for buying them. Although search engines do not ban all paid for links, Google’s terms of service frown upon paid for links. Google and most other search engines want to encourage natural links. The purpose of the search engine should be a natural flow and be as personal and applicable as possible. So, when a user searches for something it should be appropriate and natural content which links them to a site and not something which has been paid for.

To discourage the use of unethical or black hat techniques, the likes of Google have a huge responsibility to their users to offer realistic and useful search results. Anything which shows up as untoward or sneaky will be recognised by Google and penalised. Unnatural links are one of these things, and unless you really know what you are looking for within a paid link, it is highly likely that using these will result in some form of penalty from Google.

If you are employing a professional SEO company then you may find that they are reluctant to discuss paid for links. There are companies who specialise in paid links; however the majority of companies offering search engine optimisation services will not recommend this method. Paying for links can be deemed as an unnecessary cost, and the money could be better spent employing a reputable search engine optimization company to use white hat expertise to get you your rankings. Paid for links will probably be around for a while longer, however sticking to natural linking is a better long term tactic.

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