Paid links are so bad? Not sure!

I can see why so many people adamantly support 'paid links'. However, I'm not selling links on a high page rank site, so I don't have any reason to support it.

These links might help you in the short run, so long as you are not reported, but eventually it's going to turn and bite you hard.

Maybe one or two paid links here and there won't matter, but how many site owners will stop there? Most will get greedy and insist on 100 paid backlinks. If one good one worked, why not 100?

Google says, don't buy paid links that pass page rank. Not my words, go look it up. It's called a link scheme. If you want to risk it, then that's your choice.

You can call it 'playing safe', but it's going to come back around if you try it.

At some point, Google is going to get smart and slap you hard for buying paid links and all that money spent on paid links and hosting and marketing will have been wasted when you get banned from Google search.

If you're not depending on Google search (and you are if you are trying to rig the system with backlinks), then it won't hurt much. Otherwise, your site will be dead in the water, no traffic.

Just representing the other side of the argument for anyone who thinks paid links for SEO is the way to go.

As per my point of view it is harmful at one stage. Because search engine always make changes in algorithm and even today paid link is consider in black hat seo technique.

Just a few months before, I monitored my competitor back links and I found that my competitor has back links from hundreds of paid directory sites which are not only relevant but also of high authority.

I agree with you that a high quality relevant link can work wonders for your site but buying paid links is an art. You should master it instead of making any blunders. According to my experience, we should first look for spammy links in the website. Try your hands on those sites which have 0% spam.

How Google detect that link is paid link

You'll rarely ever get caught for buying a link. I see them all the time.

You've seen them too, but maybe you never spotted them because most websites don't advertise them as paid links.

Don't buy links guys, buy expiring domains with a DA of at least 20, indexed, PR of 1 or higher, CF/TF of over 10 and you are good to go, at least, in my experience, that's what I do. Yes, you can buy paid links, but I bought a PR 6 for just $100, it's an old Red Cross website. Much better than each month having to pay someone who is going to have 100 or 1000 paid links, you lose link juice from the homepage if you go the route of buying links.

Edit: To clarify, if you bought a paid link and see no results, was it worth it? Buying an old 2006 website that has gov / edu backlinks and putting maybe 2 or 3 posts on the homepage with your homepage/inner page links is a great way to ensure you have good link juice.

If you see some of these PR3 PR4 sites that offer paid links you might notice 100 or so links on their homepage (blogroll) and the link juice is really minimal. Sorry guys, just what I believe, own the site, you will have complete control, with a paid link, if their site gets deindexed you are screwed.

Stop buying links and build your own network, that way it really private and the chances of google finding it are low.

It depends ur media buying campaign how and what is your target market paid links are not bad its just how to use the links .

Truely, each backlink you acquired yourself this way or another is something Google doesn`t like , they wish to belive the people give you a credit just like that for free, no one (most of the people) can`t depend on this and they all hire a people who do that job for them or do it themseleves, so you can call it as a "buying links" it really does not matter you create your own PBN or get a seo service from someone, it`s still manipulate of their alghoritm , something they doesn`t like (:

So in my opinion all the backlinks acquired that way can be called as paid ones no matter you do it yourself or you hire someone. The question is you want to play with in accordance with Google rules or not

1. if so - just build the unique high quality content and wait when people will share it
2. if not - the only way is to build backlinks yourself or hire someone to do it

99,99% of the World is playing with Google that game (:

I'm not sure that they work negatively for your SEO. But it wouldn't benefit you much, given the algorithm's of the big search engines. So my conclusion would be, that there is nothing wrong but paid backlinks except the ROI (=return on investment) sucks!!

What is the best way to get high quality backlinks without paying for them? Would it be articles, blogs, blog comments, & videos? Any others out there?

Google can't know whether a link is paid or not. SEO without advertising is useless specially when the niche/market is competitive.

Buying links could certainly be seen as an attempt to manipulate PageRank, and there is lies the controversy. If you’ve been buying bad links (and lots of them), your actions could have caught up with you. So, you need to be careful.

In my opinion, Link Buying is not a problem, but you should keep few following points in mind, while doing this:

1). Links always be Niche Relevant
2). Don't take every single link as Dofollow
3). Link Diversification Should follow
4). And one of the most important thing, links should buy in gap of time frame

Hope this would help.

Paid links are Google's achilles tendon.

They work and they work extremely well just as long as you buy links the right way.

I have a new sites I bought links for one month ago, one week after buying links I'm bottom of page one and page two for most keywords.

Once the dust settles more I'll buy a few more and have some top rankings.

I have other sites with paid links for YEARS and dominating the SERPs.

I see Google's propaganda machine is working very well. You know why Google says that? It's because paid links work so damn well that they want to discourage people from gaming the system.

I'm more into churn and burn sites these days using blackhat techniques, which is why I rarely visit this forum anymore, but even if I was building a long term site I still wouldn't hesitate to use paid links as it's the fastest and easiest way you're going to rank and if you do things right you're as good as gold.

[QUOTE=Emily Evans;9492519]Last few days, I was thinking that buying a handful of high quality ones can speed up results.
Buying links isn't soo bad, as we hear everywhere!

You are absolutely right paid links are not so bad if it is done by experienced provider.