The short answer is yes.

Gaining backlinks to your website will always be effective when trying to rank your content in Google. However link quality is very important. If you're purchasing backlinks from low quality sites, you could end up doing more harm than good to your sites rankings.

Link quality is key

The sad truth is 95% of link sellers are selling links from low quality / spammy websites, and often times this will do more harm than good in Google’s current algorithm. Be sure to only purchase links from vetted link sellers and always verify metrics and backlink quality before ordering.

Quality over quantity

When building backlinks you should always go with quality over quantity. It's much better to invest in a few links from high authority websites instead of buying a bunch of cheap backlinks.

I myself will happily spend a few hundred dollars on a single backlink from a real authority website with thousands of solid referring domains. It always surprises me the keywords I'm able to rank for with as little as one or two links from high authority websites.


How to analyze link quality

There are a few main things you need to consider when purchasing backlinks...

Who links to the site you're gaining a link from?

I personally use Majestic SEO when analyzing backlink profiles.

First, I’ll enter the Root Domain of the website I’m looking to analyze as a potential link opportunity.


Next I’ll check the Backlinks tab to see all of the websites and pages that link to the site.


It’s easy to get carried away and spend lots of time analyzing the backlinks, but all I’m looking to confirm is that it’s got good backlinks from authoritative websites with natural looking anchor texts.


How much traffic does the site get?

Something that often times goes overlooked is the amount of traffic that goes through your backlink. This is a very under rated ranking signal. A link that gets traffic that doesn't bounce tells Google that your link is relevant.

I always verify that a website receives good traffic before I will purchase a link from them.

Checking traffic is very simple with SimilarWeb. I use their free chrome browser plugin to analyze the amount of traffic a website receives.


It will tell you a rough estimate of how much traffic a site is getting on a monthly basis (which is surprisingly accurate from my experience using it to check my own websites). SimilarWeb seems to be a lot more accurate than other traffic tools I’ve used including both SEMRush and Ahrefs.

SimilarWeb will also tell you where a sites traffic is coming from.


From my experience, if a site is not receiving traffic from Google, it’s likely not worth buying.



You can download SimilarWeb for Chrome here.

Aim for niche relevant websites

Most SEO’s know that it’s important to only buy links from websites that are relevant to your own. However, the real key is that the content that your link is placed in is relevant to your website link. Topical relevance is becoming more important. Google’s RankBrain algorithm is getting better and better at gauging topical relevance. If you're going to buy links, you’ll want to make sure you're buying them from sites that are relevant to your own.

Place your link in a relevant paragraph

Something that many SEO’s don’t consider when building links is that text that surrounds your backlink is very important. Google doesn’t just crawl your URL and anchor text, they also take into consideration the sentence/paragraph that your link is placed in. This helps them discredit links that are not topically relevant.

Be sure to send link sellers a relevant paragraph to insert your link into.

The power of niche relevant guest posts.

A good option when purchasing backlinks is to buy niche relevant guest posts. I've been using guest posts to rank my content since the end of 2015.

I use them for one reason and one reason only; they work.

Incase you're not familiar with what guest posting is. Guest posting is when you write an article for a website that is not your own.

I only have one main issue with purchasing guest post links.

The market is currently flooded with link sellers that sell links from low quality sites or dressed up pbns and are calling them “Guest Posts”.

If you're going to buy guest post links, you need to be extra careful when choosing a seller.

Only buy links from websites that a) receive traffic from Google, and b) have quality backlink profiles. I always ask link sellers to send me the URLs of websites I’m interested in before I purchase, so that I can do my due diligence and verify that they are quality. (this sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many guest post sellers will not reveal the websites they are selling links from).

Which link sellers do you recommend?

I personally recommend a service called Submit a Guest Post which is run by a good friend of mine, Peter King.

Essentially the way their service works is they negotiate rock bottom deals with webmasters of high authority websites to contribute niche relevant articles with do-follow backlinks included in the articles.

So you just pick the website(s) you’d like your link featured on, and submit your URL and desired anchor text. Then their writers will produce a niche relevant article with your link included and submit it to the website you’ve picked. They will then send you the live URL where your link is placed.

I’m a huge fan of their service, because unlike most link seller's… Their links have actually gotten me results.

Here is a screenshot of some ranking increases I saw after purchasing a link from them back in February.


Their platform is 100% free to sign-up and they charge a one-time price per backlink. They will also display the URLs of any websites you are interested in, which is a nice bonus that most link sellers will not accommodate.

Gaining backlinks is only one piece of the puzzle

While building quality backlinks can be a very effective way to rank your content; it’s only one piece of the puzzle. You’ll still need to make sure that your on-page SEO and content is solid.

It doesn’t matter how many backlinks you build, if your on-page content isn’t optimized for your target keywords, your link building efforts will go to waste.

Quality Content is King

The bottom line is that if the content you’re linking to isn't keeping users engaged, your link building will likely not have much of an effect.

Quality content will always be King, so be sure to produce content that keeps users engaged.

However, even though content is King, link building is Queen and she runs the castle. Gaining quality backlinks will almost always be necessary when trying to rank your content for competitive keywords.