We’ll be blunt: Earning backlinks is hard work. Some brands, especially in the early days of internet advertising, preferred just to shell out cash to buy backlinks rather than earn them the hard way.
But isn’t buying backlinks wrong? Doesn’t Google slap you with penalties for paid backlinks? Besides, isn’t it just plain unethical?
So lets answer those questions:
As we said, Google sees buying backlinks as scam-like and manipulative as a general rule.
I mean, you didn’t earn that backlink by giving the reader valuable content via something like a guest post. The site linking to you isn’t truly “endorsing” your stuff. So in Google’s eyes, you shouldn’t get rewarded with better SEO and a better SERP ranking.
That’s the key, though—the SEO and SERP ranking—and the endorsement aspect.
Google does let you buy backlinks if you’re transparent that you bought that backlink and it’s not an organic endorsement of your work. You can do this with a “sponsored” tag. In the HTML, you’d add the following attribute: rel="sponsored".
This tells Google you got the link through “advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements,” according to Google’s Search Central blog.
You may also be able to use a nofollow in the link to add link diversity. This tells Google not to crawl the link and consider it for ranking purposes.
You won’t directly get SEO juice out of purchased links, but they can get you some referral traffic via the people who actually visit your site through the link.
If these visitors stay on your site for a while and find it helpful, Google might eventually rank your site and the individual page higher based on the increased traffic.
And if you’re selling something, this referral traffic can turn into sales. So buying backlinks can be seen as a paid lead acquisition tool, just like paid ads and similar strategies.
The bottom line: Buying backlinks can be a decent strategy for brands that have recently launched and need to jumpstart their traffic.
Now that we’ve got that down, how do you actually get started? If you want to maximize the benefits of buying backlinks and watch out for the pitfalls, you have to do it the right way.
Before you buy a backlink, think about why you’re buying the backlinks in the first place. What do you want to achieve?
Are you trying to make e-commerce sales? Gain brand visibility? Get the referral traffic to explore your other pages via internal links and help their SEO indirectly?
Unlike organic SEO efforts, which are “free” monetarily but cost time, you directly trade money for results here. So you really want to be careful and make sure you’re getting exactly the results you’re paying for.
It’s also critical to know your objectives so you can determine whether your paid backlink campaign is earning a return that justifies the cost. That way you’ll know when it’s time to pull the plug and stop running paid backlink campaigns.
Here’s the fun part! After establishing the objectives it’s time to decide how much money you want to dish out to pay for them. Backlink costs can vary widely, along with things like your niche, the site you’re getting links from, and the type of backlink service you choose all playing a part.
You have to find the right balance between your available capital and your objectives. Too much spending on paid backlinks can lead to diminishing returns, but too little might not get you enough results to justify the cost and effort.
Next, look at your competition’s backlinks. See what sites they’re getting their backlinks from. If you can, separate the organic links from the paid ones to see the breakdown of their organic links vs. paid links.
See any patterns? Any links that many competitors share? Those might be opportunities to pursue.
After that, perform a backlink gap analysis by reviewing your current backlink profile. Note which links you share with competitors and which you might still need.
This whole process takes way too long by hand—so consider grabbing an SEO tool that can handle the analysis for you.
Relevance and authority are paramount. Find reputable sites in your industry or niche. Look into their domain authority to confirm their legitimacy. Make sure they have an engaged audience that trusts them as well.
Make a list of these sites, then begin your outreach. Frame your pitch to appeal to their business goals and make it about them. Focus on how a link to your site helps them by providing their audience an excellent resource to check out.
Keep in mind that many sites explicitly sell paid backlinks in the form of sponsored posts— basically, a paid guest post. It’ll be easier to broach the topic for these sites, but they may be more competitive. This only ups the importance of showing them how they benefit from giving you a backlink.
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Over-deliver the actual content, whether that’s a sponsored post on someone else’s site or the page the backlink points readers to on your site. Doing this will ensure the readers are happy and don’t see your site as spam.
Nailing this and the previous step can start a strong relationship with the linking site. This could lead to future organic backlinking opportunities or other collaborations.
Before buying a backlink from someone, make sure they’re willing to put the nofollow or sponsored tag in the HTML.
Then, when you get the backlink, triple-check that it has that nofollow or sponsored tag it needs. Even just one paid link slipping by could hurt your SEO and ruin your paid backlinking efforts. Check these regularly, in case something changes within the links.
Google will never stop changing its algorithm in its quest for maximizing the helpfulness of its search results. Thus, there may come a day when paid backlink policies change.
Rules might tighten, forcing you to change things to keep your SEO recognizable and legitimized. More unlikely is that Google rules may loosen, in which case you might be able to expand your paid backlink efforts.
The happy truth is, Google won’t likely rule against paid backlinks entirely. There’s an awful lot of money to be made there, and they do serve a purpose. But be prepared for policy changes just in case.
Buying backlinks is already a “tolerated, but not ideal” SEO practice. So you really have to be careful how you go about it.
Black hat tactics are employing efforts to rank higher in search engines that go against the search engine guidelines. If search engines find you doing this, they’ll take away your ill-gotten SEO gains and punish you.
Here are some black hat link-building tactics to steer clear of:
Link farms: Networks of sites whose sole existence is to exchange backlinks. Google and other search engines think this is manipulative and they’ll associate you with scammy websites.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs): This is when one entity owns a bunch of websites purely to manipulate search engines.
Duplicate content: Copying other people’s content so you can put your own backlinks into it is unethical and, of course, punishable by search engines.
Buying and redirecting expired domains: This can be seen as “paying” for backlinks in a way, but of course, it’s a black hat tactic. You aren’t providing value, just accumulating useless backlinks.
Negative SEO: Buying bad links to redirect to your competitor’s sites is actually possible. And while it might work from a strictly SEO perspective by lowering their rankings, this is obviously unethical and will result in punishment from search engines.
It’s possible to do things by the book and still get bad backlinks. Usually, this involves getting broadly good but niche-irrelevant backlinks, or niche-relevant but low-quality backlinks.
You’re already playing a delicate game in the paid backlinks arena. So focus only on highly relevant, high-quality backlinks—even if it means you have to pay more.
Overusing certain anchor text can result in SEO penalties in earned backlinks because it looks unnatural and spammy. But, at least in that case, you’re trying to boost your favor with the search engines.
With paid backlinks, there’s no reason to cram in the same anchor text a hundred times. The search engines aren’t paying a whole lot of attention to these paid backlinks (if you do them right), but readers are.
And your readers will find it quite annoying when the anchor text reads like it was crammed in there. Remember, online content needs to be helpful. The anchor text should incorporate the keywords you want while still sounding normal and natural.
Let’s zoom out. Even though paid backlinks can be good initially, that should NOT be your only strategy. For one, it’ll make your link profile look too skewed, and search engines think that looks weird.
On top of that, you might face financial strain. You could easily put some of that money into other efforts that generate more traffic per dollar.
Also, you won’t get the full benefits of organic backlinks—remember paid backlinks are always nofollow and sponsored. Dofollow backlinks—the organic ones that get SEO juice—should still be your ultimate goal.
Balance paid backlinks with a long-term organic SEO strategy. Optimize your website and create quality content. These will eventually earn some backlinks when people start to learn about you.
Start reaching out for backlinks through methods like guest posting, niche edits, and resource or link roundup pages once you gain some traction.
Once your backlink-buying-machine is running full force, keep an eye on the metrics to make sure you’re moving toward your goals.
Ranking metrics matter to some degree, but they’re ultimately impacted by the traffic you receive. So the metrics to watch most closely are related to the human user rather than the search engine.
Here are a few metrics to track:
Referral traffic: Measure trends in your site traffic and, if possible, the amount of traffic that actually comes from each specific link. Upward trends in traffic indicate success.
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is how many people leave your site after only visiting one page. A low bounce rate indicates your backlinks are relevant and targeting the right people—ones who are sticking around to see more.
Dwell time: This measures how long people stay on your site. It also tells you how relevant your content is. Longer dwell times mean you have better or more relevant content.
ROI on backlinks: Ultimately, you want to know if you’re earning back the money you pay for backlinks. This will involve comparing your backlink spending to the overall revenue you can attribute to your backlinking.
Buying backlinks is certainly a gray area in SEO. One might say it’s a “gray-hat” strategy. It escapes the black-hat label only if you disclose that the links are paid and exclude them from SEO consideration.
Yet, it still helps you indirectly through referral traffic. And paid backlinks from the right sites can lead to long-term relationships and organic backlinks.
But here’s one final secret for you: There’s an even better way. Why not pay for legitimate organic links? Get all the SEO benefits and referral traffic with none of the work.
In our opinion, if you’re going to pay for backlinks, you want the best links from the top sites. Profit Engine can help you do that. Book a free strategy session to learn how.
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