Some businesses follow a strategy of increasing SEO rankings by purchasing backlinks frequently. Many marketers find it attractive when they believe that revenue produced by good ranking will cover the cost of purchasing links. But this is not as easy as it sounds, to buy tons of backlinks from SEO experts or by talking to owners of Private Blog Network (PBN). You can also build a bunch of profiles and add links to your website. Everything said and done, problems and penalties persist.
Here is why you should make quality backlinks yourself instead of purchasing them.
Buying Backlinks for SEO is not in the guidelines
Google has clearly stated that purchasing or selling backlinks to improve your ranking breaks their rules. Google consider links as a vote and paying for a vote is unethical! Hence, Google has introduced its rules on prohibited links that include:
- Buying or selling links that bypass PageRank
- Excessive link exchanges
- Guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text
- Use of automated services to create links to your site
How marketers purchase backlinks
Various SEO experts gamble to increase visibility over the Internet and buying backlinks from people who have made their individual Private Blog Networks (PBNs). Such PBNs are made of domains that have been around for years. Google does not appreciate such blogs as it only wants to index the information which valuable to users, as opposite to indexing pages that do nothing more than hosting backlinks.
Delicate stuff around purchasing backlinks
Webmasters, who have a pool of PBNs in their portfolio, purposely hide it from inquisitive marketers on the web. Because of this, bots of companies like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Majestic cannot crawl such websites. When a website blocks a lot of bots from crawling, Google often considers such websites as shady.
Backlinks price for you
Like any other service, PBNs are not free and depend on the reputation of PBN owner, due to which the pricing is not consistent. There is no verification for the purchase backlinks anymore because PBNs owners can hide their website from crawling on a search engine. Furthermore, you can get a list of domains that displays you links with traffic flow (TF) and citation flow (CF) instead of pages containing backlinks. So, you need to take a decision with self-belief!
Backlinks spin your content
Another reason for avoiding PBNs and purchasing backlinks for SEO is that PBN owners make content just by spinning content on the web using free tools. Spinning or twisting content is a common black-hat practice, in which a software is used to change words of existing content and avoid being marked as duplicate content by Google. The problem with spinning software is that output is not anywhere near perfect and it looks like a content written by an amateur, with grammatical and syntactical errors.
Short form content
PBNs make use of short from content (usually 300-350 words) and a backlink, on every purchase. Google gives more value to long-form content; hence you will get better SEO benefits from your own long form content instead of purchasing low-quality backlinks.
Google devalues the backlinks instead of penalizing
Earlier, Google used to penalize the websites, and webmasters would then reject the spam backlinks to get back to their normal page rankings again. Now, instead of penalizing, Google devalues the backlink itself, which decreases the page rankings. It is not like your site will be put under manual review for further enhancement, rather you will again have to invest your money and time into improving the SEO rankings.
Google understands when you buy backlinks
Google has started analyzing how pages are related to each other on the web. If it finds any pattern in linking to common websites that sell backlinks, Google recognizes it. This has a negative impact on SEO rankings.
Be decent when linking back to your website
It is completely alright if you do guest blogging. Find someone who blogs and request that person if you can do a guest post on their website. When you post something on someone else’s website, you can link back to your own website and it is a legally accepted SEO practice. Just remember to keep your links relevant. For example, if your guest post is about cooking services, make sure to link back a part of your site which is relevant to cooking services.
It is, therefore, imperative that instead of finding an easy way out, you should work on building a strong backlink profile by following Google’s Webmaster Rules. It is a proven way to do things that are essential for fetching long-term results. With recent algorithm changes, Google is moving its focus from the use of backlinks and ranking factor. Hence, understand the business of SEO services, that emphasizes more on user experience (UX) and content instead.
