Is Using a Backlinking Service Illegal?

It's a lot harder to get the much-feared "Google penalties" than people realise. As long as you're not employing someone who's doing mass-spamming with Xrumer and that type of software, you have nothing to worry about. And as explained above, those services aren't worth buying anyway, for so many different reasons ...

But it's not illegal per se. I'm not a lawyer, but really, not.

Don't worry. I'll come and visit you.

It's not really. He has one of the biggest SEO WSOs on the Warrior Forum.
Matt LaClear's service is the service I use.

Yes, I do. Completely happy with the service and don't have to agonize about my links spamming every site on the Internet.

They will never find out if you do it properly, as long as you don't create backlinks en masse in a short period of time then you have nothing to worry about. If it really concerns you this much and you're thinking about trying to rank sites in Google then you're probably best off just forgetting about trying. Without backinks your sites will get nowhere in Google and unless you want to wait months for people to start organically linking to you then self-created backlinks is the way to go.

P.S. and no you will never go to jail for creating backlinks or having them created for you, if that was the case then people would just go around creating "malicious" backlinks directed to their competitor's sites and get them sent to jail!

One thing Google has let out is that intent is a big part of their consideration before they apply any penalties. And about the only penalty they can really give an individual site owner is removing their site from the search results, or degrading their search position.

If you (or your contractor) take actions consistent with gaming the search engine in order to artificially inflate search positions, you could be penalized. Because of the ease with which a competitor could create such an appearance, even that isn't often fatal.

Take the given example of buying text links...

Say you have a product that can be used to alleviate symptoms of a skin condition. You buy a text link with the name of that condition on a page about that skin condition. That could be considered legitimate advertising, because you could reasonably expect visitors to that site to click the link to your related site.

Same scenario, but instead of a related site, you pay to put the text link in the footer of a blog on raising tropical fish, simply because it has a high pagerank. This link would likely be ignored because the reasonable expectation isn't there. You would be assumed to be linking purely for the link juice.

Let's take another example. Same product.

You create a forum account and profile on a forum devoted to health and beauty tips for teen girls. In your profile, and your sig file (if allowed), you link to your product information. Legit tactic.

You create a forum account, with no posts, on a backwater quantum physics forum under the PR8 domain of a .edu institution. Pure play for link juice again, and the link is likely to be ignored.

We could go through more examples, but I think you're plenty smart enough to get what I'm saying.

Unless the package you bought slides over the line into outright fraud or something illegal on its own, you likely won't face consequences more severe than a lighter bank account and perhaps a temporary hit to rankings.

On a side note, I agree with Alexa. About the only time pagerank means anything significant anymore is if you are trying to sell either linking services or the links themselves.

What if the porn pedophile guy just found your site online and liked it so much that he decided to link to it? You can't control whether someone links to your site or not.

The answer is no, you can not get in trouble for that. If you were linking to his site that might be another story.

Thanks John for the answer!

Hey John...you and I are on the same page for sure on this. It would be the wild wild west all over again if you could damage a site with links.