You made a great site. You filled it up with some great content and informative pages. You spent a lot on the design of the site too – it looks attractive and professional. Everything seems to be fine however you are not satisfied.

The reason of your dissatisfaction is that you are getting few visitors and you are not doing good business. You did some research to find out why the search engines especially Google is not sending traffic to your site. Then someone told you that your site is not ranked well with the search engines and that’s probably because not many websites are linking to your site.

So to increase link popularity you started sending emails to website owners in the hope that if they give a link to your site, you will link to their site in return. It didn’t work out as reciprocal link exchange has lost its importance.

In frustration you have decided to buy links.

Well be warned, Google discourages webmasters to buy links from other sites just to increase link popularity.

NOTE: It does not mean that Google hates paid links. If you are buying paid links to advertise your site in some other site to get traffic, its perfectly ok. However if Google robots come to know that a link is paid link to increase link popularity or page rank of a site, the site may get banned altogether.

Why Google hate paid links?

Google, as you must have known by now, gives a lot of importance to inbound links to a website. If a website has a lot of good websites linking to it, the site will get good ranks in the search results.

However this theory is based on the fact that webmasters link to other websites if they feel that the website offers some good value to their site visitors.

This link is out of interest and offers value to their visitors. But a paid link may not offer any value to the visitor of a site, further may influence the search engine results.

Google can tolerate anything but spam. This way of linking is considered spam by major search engines and therefore should be avoided.

If you are thinking how on earth Google will know if a link is paid or not, then here is some more information for you.

Google has three ways to detect if a link is paid or not.

1. Software: Google software that crawls the web. It has unique and complex algorithm that decides if a link is paid or not.

2. Manual checking: Google has appointed spam check officers that keep checking the web for any paid links (and any other form of spamming the search results.)

3. Third Party Reporting: If someone finds a paid link they can directly report it to Google. Here is an article on how to report paid links.

So be very cautious if you want to buy links to increase link popularity of your site. You may well regret your decision.

However if you want to buy links to advertise your site, there is no problem and you may go ahead. But there are some ethical ways to do it, so that the search engine knows that it’s a paid link to advertise and not to spam the results.

Read my post on how to buy links to make sure the search engines understand they are paid links and therefore should not be considered while raking websites and giving page rank (PR).

NOTE: If you want to get great links to your site (not paid), read my post on how to get great incoming links.

Your views are important to me. Please do leave a comment.

Related Topics:
 
1. Is Reciprocal Link Exchange important
2. How to Find Inbound Links in Google and Yahoo