Paid Links - Good For Your Site?

The buying and selling of text links has long been an issue of contention for search engines, website owners, and search engine optimisers. While some websites merrily go through the purchasing process and benefit from driving targeted traffic and improving their search positioning, recent news seems to dictate that paid linking may not be a good SEO strategy.

General Paid Links

It's important to realise that paid linking does not necessarily have to be used in an SEO campaign. A text link can be used to drive traffic from the page of one site to the page of another site. In these cases, the concept of paid linking itself is obviously a good one. Whether or not the practice proves to be effective is down to site selection, link placement, the anchor text used, and other determining factors.

The Advantages Of A Paid Link

By purchasing a link on a related website, and ensuring that the link is in a prominent position on a busy page it can drive very powerful traffic to your site. Using the appropriate anchor text not only ensures the best possible amount of traffic, but also helps to increase the conversion rate of that traffic. So, paid linking, in itself, is not a bad thing.

SEO And Links

When it comes to the use of paid links in an SEO campaign, though, the story looks a little different. Search engines like Google use links as a vote of popularity and worth for a web page. The more links and the higher quality of the linking pages, the more worth your page apparently has. As such, search engines prefer to think of the act of linking as being organic; a webmaster visits your page, appreciates the content, and links to it as a result. In practice, of course, links are rarely garnered this naturally.

Ignorance Was Bliss

As such, the search engines do not like the concept of selling text links to help with search engine ranking. This has always been the case, but until recently it has been argued that the search engines were virtually incapable of telling a paid link from a natural, organic link. The practice was frowned upon but it was also largely ignored.

Changing Times?

It is still unlikely that the search engines have any software or algorithmically based method of telling paid links from natural links. The very fact that Google now openly encourages surfers to report paid links would certainly seem to verify this fact. After all, it wouldn't be necessary to report paid links if they were automatically detected.

The High Cost Of An SEO Paid Link

A website may be able to get away with using paid link tactics as long as they use the right service. But, do paid links offer any real value in this respect? Most services sell links according to the Google PageRank that the linking page can boast. The higher the PageRank, the higher the monthly rental for that link. Highly ranked pages can run to hundreds of dollars per month for just one link. Is it worth it? The answer, again, comes down to whether the link will directly drive traffic.

Determining The Value Of A Link

Hundreds of dollars may not be a lot of money if that link will drive large amounts of targeted traffic to your pages. Factor in a high conversion rate and your ROI could be extremely high. In terms of an SEO campaign, though, there are methods of building links from equally beneficial pages without having to pay this amount of money.

Paid Links For Your Website Marketing

The case for paid linking needs to be judged on a per-link and per-campaign basis. It is frowned upon by the search engines, and some major engines are more actively policing the act of buying and selling text links. If a link is found to have been purchased and not proffered based on content quality then any ranking improvement gained by that link will be lost. It is more sensible to base the decision of whether to buy a text link or not on whether it will drive targeted traffic.