SEO Report – Are Paid Links Safe?

Paid links are not an effective link building strategy when it comes to SEO. The ONLY time you should ever use paid links is as advertising, and these should be no-followed. Using paid links as a way to get links from high PageRank sites is not only not effective, it is most definitely not safe as you WILL get caught and Google will penalize you severely for trying to ‘fool’ the search engines. Therefore, the answer the this post’s title “Are paid links safe?” is a resounding “NO!”

Search engines really, really don’t like webmasters trying to bolster their websites ranking by buying links from other websites. Google has denounced paid links and both when obtained from from link farms and when bought privately from websites and / or blogs with high Page Rank.. Google and other search engines will be able to easily pick out the difference between a natural link and a paid link, and your competitors will also be quick to report you and watch you get a penalty in the rankings for using paid links!

At any rate, paid links are not permanent links. A few websites may try to sell webmasters permanent or lifetime links, but such a thing is really only dependent on the lifetime of the website at best.

Even if the links are still alive in a year or two they may have been pushed down the list or relocated to some obscure place with no relevant content around the link. These links are not going to get your website very far in terms of SEO because improvement in search ranking brought about by temporary links will never last long. Your position in search results will drop again, and your money will be gone, Better to spend the time and money building one way permanent organic links that can multiply!

When using a link building package from an SEO firm, make sure they do not buy links. When you pay for your links, your website promotion budget will  quickly spin out of control because you will have to keep buying more every month to ensure you keep your ranking – assuming you don’t get caught by Google or the other search engines.

Bottom line –  when there are so many quality link building approaches available, it is not a justified tactic to buy your links. Even if you think that you do not have time to do the link building work yourself you can hire a professional SEO company and get them to build your links using organic techniques. Instead of paying for links, you can use that money to pay the SEO company and the links you will get will be permanent one way links and relevant niche links from high PR websites.  Your website will be safe from search engine penalties, and you will rise naturally in the rankings and hold your position.

If you are already using paid links you need to no-follow them all immediately. Don’t buy links unless you have a specific need for traffic and it is a good ad investment, and always no-follow. When it comes to website promotion, it is always best to go with the safest approach even though the results will be slower. Don’t risk your website’s online reputation by buying links to artificially raise PageRank.