Buying Text Links; Good or Bad?

There are many questions and at least as many answers to buying text links. Will it help your search engine rankings? Will you be banned by Google? Will it increase your PageRank? Will you receive targeted traffic from these links? These are the questions on search optimizers’ and search marketers’ minds lately.

There is nothing wrong with advertising on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is a good thing. Advertising on major sites where your market hangs out is even better. After all, the idea is to bring targetted traffic to your site. Just any visitor won’t help if they are not the ones that are buying your products or clicking on your ads (Adsense or others). Your advertisements on other sites are really none ofGoogle’s business and should not get your site banned or penalized.

So what’s the problem?

Well, many of ads that are bought on websites are not necessarily purchased for the targeted traffic they may bring, but instead is an attempt to influence the link popularity of your site via the backlinks.

Google has made it clear that they do not like the practice of purchasing links. They want good, well-liked content to attract visitors. They also want webmasters and advertisers to by their form of text link known as Adsense.

To the various search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone thinks the site or a specific page is useful or interesting and wants others to be aware of it. In and of itself this is very true, however Google (and Yahoo at one point with WebRank) made it obvious to webmasters and marketers that, if they want to be found via an organic web search, they may need to increase their PageRank. One big way to do this is via backlinks, which is a link back to your site.

Unfortunately, a link could mean many things in this day and age. It could be that the webmaster wants to advertise, link to something interesting, trade links with another website, or even point out something negative about another site. How is Google going to know why someone links to something? They really cannot. They can tailor and improve their algorithm and what the spiders follow, but they still are relying on people to investigate and report “violators”, in other words, those who buy or trade links or other “schemes”, as they put it.

The good news for Google and the like (and perhaps the bad news for test link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them can tend to leave a noticeable identifiers behind in the code. It would not be any trouble for a search engine to look into the latest identifiers are, find all pages with them, and not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty necessarily. This would be a way for the search engines to count only “votes” and not ads or purchased links. The ads would still be worth your effort for the traffic they bring, but not for providing you any link popularity. With that your rankings could drop if it was heavily dependent upon the link popularity of the purchased links or advertising.

It’s not a matter of ‘if’ this will happen with paid text link ads, but ‘when’. For now, if you’re buying text link ads, keep in mind that when the time comes that Google no longer allows these links to pass “link juice”, your rank could be negatively effected. The biggest losers will likely be those that sell text link advertising. If you just focus on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and not on the PageRank, you will be fine.