Paid links and their Disadvantages

Back links are the links from other site that point to a particular website and are one of the most essential factors of a good website and most of the webmasters try to get more back links for their sites. The links which one acquires by paying for it is known as paid links. Many of the webmasters considers this method as a good method to increase the website’s link popularity, but often they land in trouble.

Search engine giant Google hates paid links and they have mentioned it clearly before. They even has an official form which enables webmasters to report paid links to Google. Even though the back links determines the reputation of the website, it is purely based on the quality of those links. Google does not like links from bad or irrelevant sites and does not encourage them at all. If the links are from quality and relevant sites, Google makes sure that it gives enough point to those back links.

In paid links, some of them come from irrelevant or spam sites, and webmasters use the paid links to manipulate the Google ranking systems. The webmasters engage in buying or selling links that pass Page Rank and pay little importance to the quality of the links, sources etc. Such link buying strategies without caring about the quality may have long term impact on a website. Moreover the buying or selling of back links that pass page rank  is violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and hence it can have a bad effect on the search ranking of the site.

The best remedy for this is to avoid engaging in the buying or selling of links. In case you buy or sell links, make sure that you use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which shows that you are not trying to manipulate your site ranking with that link. This doesn’t mean that Google is totally against backlinks. In order to have a good search engine ranking and popularity you need to have relevant and quality back links. The only thing you need to take care is not to go aggressive with paid links, as they may land you in trouble. So next time you go for link building, try to get it from related and quality sites. Also avoid automated link building systems, which may again land you in trouble with low quality links.