This whole "buying links is bad" thing is really irritating

For two reasons:

1. As a site/business owner, why in the heck wouldn't you want to buy links to get more traffic to your site. Why is it ok to buy traffic from Google Adwords, but not from a site selling link spots? This is a very slippery slope Google is creating by blatantly saying you'll get penalized for obvious link buys...

2. They're thinking is totally backwards on the subject. Their reasoning is based on the idea that "anyone can just go out and buy links", but what idiot goes out and buys links for stupid, crappy sites that don't give the end user the experience they want (there are tons and they go broke quick mind you)? If you as a business/ site owner feels that your site is good enough to spend thousands of dollars in buying links, then isn't that an indication that your site is WORTH BUYING these links for? I mean seriously, either you're:

a. not going to make any money from your paid links and then they'll come down (which in a perfect world would bring your natural listings down),
b. you'll make money from the paid links and keep them up, showing that the site is actually GOOD!
or
c. you have a bad site and have ridiculously deep pockets or just don't care about losing money, (but this option is the most unlikely out of the three).

The fact of the matter is that if you're willing to PAY MONEY FOR LINKS then you've probably got a site that's worth it. If anything is an indicator (besides user reviews or some other quantifiable user measure) of whether a site is worth getting natural Google listings, then MONEY SPENT on marketing and links is!

And don't even get me started on the whole "moral" issue either, that's a whole other thread!

/rant

What are your thoughts on the subject?

There are 2 main reasons to buy links:
Traffic and Ranking

Google has nothing against buying links for traffic. Add nofollow and yo uare fine.
Google has something against buying links for ranking. Often the links are not relevant to the sites topic thus useless for the visitor. They simply exist to pass linkjuice and thats what Google does not want.

If you live from selling links from your site add to paid links a nofollow tag and you can still make your money.

Oh boy, my rant continues...


First off, you're talking about two different things, BUYING and SELLING.

I'm buying a link on PerezHilton.com for $5k a week and I shouldn't get the added benifit of the passing of the PR? Not to mention I don't own PerezHilton, so who am I to make requests for the link to be a nofollow anyway?

From a selling standpoint, ok I'm Perez Hilton and I'm selling links for $5k a week and NOT PASSING PR??? But TMZ is selling them for 4k a week and passing PR, guess I'll have to drop my price to $3k a week because Google says nofollow??? Who is Google to say who I can and can't pass my hard earned juice to anyway? Google didn't create the Internet, Google didn't create PerezHilton, and Google doesn't own the world!

My own opinion is that it's a good thing.
In a way it's sad that Google started this whole "link-mania" thing; now I can only see two options for them:
1. Change they're fundamental principle about links=votes and look for other ways to rank sites.
2. Devalue paid and spam links.

Otherwise he who has the biggest budget/most time to spam gets the #1 spot irrespective of the quality of his site.

You said "you'll make money from the paid links and keep them up, showing that the site is actually GOOD"... I don't agre with that; just because a site sells product/makes money doesn't mean it's the best site in it's field.

You also said "The fact of the matter is that if you're willing to PAY MONEY FOR LINKS then you've probably got a site that's worth it" Worth it to you yes... Google are trying to find which sites are most worth it to the surfer not the site owner.

If it makes more money and sells more product/services then the competitors it does!

Um, if I'm going to pay 5k a week for a link, I'd better hope that it's worth it for the surfer.

You're basically saying that some site that spent $100 to make their site deserves the same chance to rank #1 for their keyword as a company that spent $1 MM.

I see where you're coming from, but as a SEO/SEM that's worked his way up from nothing and made millions for companies, I see it totally differently. There's a direct correlation between what's best for the end user, and what the marketer/SEO person can pay, and this is just a fact. Anyone who's done competitive PPC ($20k a month minimum) will agree with me whole heartely.

I'd also like to clarify something for channel5. Link farms and spammy sites are considered "devalued"m, so that argument is a moot point because no one would do it, end of story. But going out and spending $50 a pop on 1000 really good, paid, for SERP manipulation, links on good PR sites brings the grand total to $50,000, and you're saying that's not the same as advertising?

Say I go out and call up a bunch of good sites and ask them to put a link to my site up. That still costs me money in my time, and Google claims to really like that, so where is the difference?


Edit: I'd also just like to state that being devalued for paid links is mostly speculative at this point, as I've never seen any evidence of it, but by Google's language, this sounds like where they're heading.

I would suggest starting with Matt Cutts, who has said quite a bit on the issue.

CommonDavid, simple question for you:

Is your primary goal when you buy the links for the improvement it brings to your search rankings, or is it for the traffic you gain by people following the links?

It makes perfect sense for a business man to buy ads for keywords that the content of his site does not directly relate to because people might get distracted from their original query and decide to spontaneously buy his product instead. This is not in the best interest of the user.

It's true that it's stupid to pay a lot of money for advertising that won't convert. Still, the logic that spending money for something entails that it's worth it is dangerous IMHO.

There are so many people who provide good content on the web and who cannot afford to advertise heavily or don't consider the possibility or just have other things on their mind. Not showing these excellent resources to the users of Google would be extremely stupid.

Well me personally, I've never really bought links for SERPs besides Yahoo Dir and a handful of smaller directories. I've been 80% PPC/ad buys/SEM/Amazon/Ebay since December when I turned my efforts to about 90% SEO. The paid links I've gotten for SERPs have never brought any traffic.

The lines are also starting to cross here if you examine it carefully. Yahoo has thousands of PPC partners that display your ads when you buy PPC traffic whether you like it or not. These partners are in Google, and could be very easily determined by Google as PAID links. Since the majority of this traffic (partner) sucks, the only benefit you really get from it are the thousands of backlinks (to be noted you can block 250 partner sites in YSM, but I've been pushing to getting that changed to unlimited).

I've had a lot of coffee today, so sorry for any tangents....

OK so I am assuming that you mean you have bought these for the click throughs, so if the sites you are buying use nofollow on the links then neither you nor they will be penalised as this is advertising, not an attempt at SERPS manipulation.

So you have no argument with Google.

Although I totally agree with you that if the content does not directly relate then it's not a good idea I'd have to ask if you are the surfer's mother? Maybe they found something really cool that isn't related, this is the whole idea behind Google's purchase of the famous pop up company Double click now isn't it?


They might have good content, great site blah blah blah, but if they "can't afford it" they're not doing something right....

Oh wait... I mean there's no money to be made on the Internet!

They don't use nofollows, and it's out of my hands whether they do or not anyway.