One of the most contentious and hotly debated topics when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), digital marketing and getting your website ranked highly in Google is link building.
Back in the old days of digital marketing, Google invented what it called its Page Rank algorithm. This essentially meant that the more high-quality websites you had linking to you, the better your Page Rank would be and the higher you would rank on Google for particular search phrases related to your website.
This meant that people in the digital marketing industry quickly discovered that if you had loads of sites linking to you, you were going to rank very high, so the obvious thing to do was to build loads of links pointing to your website and they went out and did just that. They got loads and loads of links from websites that weren’t necessarily of a very high quality and were generated pretty much exclusively to link to other websites. You might call these “link farms” – dodgy websites that were just there to link to other websites. In our industry, they did that to increase the rankings of their websites and their clients’ websites
And, quite frankly, it worked very well. This meant doing SEO on a website back in the early to mid-2000s was relatively easy, because you knew with near certainty that what you were going to do was going to work, and that the effects were going to be pretty immediate.
But the long and short of it was though that Google – the almighty Google who shall always be obeyed – has always said that paying to manipulate its rankings, such as paying for a link for the purposes of increasing your website’s rankings, is against its terms of service. Getting your knuckles rapped by Google can get your rankings heavily penalised and you could in fact end up with no rankings at all if you were to really go for it and undo these links in in an extremely dodgy way, which a lot of digital marketing agencies around the mid to late 2000s and the early 2010s found happened to them.
But even though this has always been the case, a load of companies over the years have cropped up that essentially do their business renting links for digital marketing agencies and website owners so that they can artificially manipulate the rankings of their websites. So you would go to them, pay them and get a link on their websites.
In around 2012, Google did a big purge on this. Loads of loads of websites that were doing this all lost their rankings overnight, and a lot of digital marketing agencies quickly went out of business.
Now, you’d think that these websites that were selling these links would have lost their whole business, and that their whole business model would have gone because you can now no longer rely on digital marketing agencies buying links from you to artificially increase the rankings of their clients’ websites. But in fact, what actually happened was these companies would flip it around and go “right, well, you’ve got loads of dodgy links on our websites, so you want us to remove those otherwise your clients are never going to recover within Google, so you are going to have to pay us to take them off.” You’ve got to hand it to them really, they were charging people to actually rent links in the first place and then they were charging them to remove them. That’s genius!
If you’re reading this now and you’re a business owner, and your digital marketing agency, SEO freelancer or whatever you want to call them is paying for links for you, they are cheating! They are manipulating Google’s rankings and you WILL get caught, and you deserve what’s coming to you quite frankly, because you shouldn’t be doing that. If your website is good enough, and your content is well written and worth reading among your target audience, then you should be able to build those links naturally and not have to pay for them.
Over the last year or so, this whole industry seems to have gone full circle once again. I’m seeing a lot of Facebook Ads – funnily enough aimed at digital marketing and SEO agency owners – promising quicker results if you use their link farms.
I don’t really understand how this has become a thing again because they are so blatant with the fact that they are essentially renting links, which is, always was and always will be against Google’s terms and conditions. There’s this one company in particular – I don’t really want to mention the name because I don’t want to give them the publicity – but there is a business based in Scotland with multiple Facebook Ads essentially talking about getting links for your website, getting links for your clients’ websites, and how you can get a report on what links you need to have for your website in order for your website to get the rankings that it needs. You pay money for this this report which is then exchanged into credits for their links, so it couldn’t be clearer that you’re paying for the links.
A lot of the comments on these ads are similar to what my vein of thought would be – this is spam, this is black hat, this is unethical, this is against Google’s terms of service, why on Earth are you advertising this as a service when clearly anybody that takes advantage of it is going to be taken advantage of? Yet it’s still there, and the comments are unmoderated, so whoever’s running these ads clearly isn’t checking what people are putting on there.
I don’t get it, I don’t understand who’s doing this. If it’s you, stop it! It’s a short-term gain that is headed for long-term disaster. Google will find you and bite your ass!
They’re not the only ones though. There’s another company running an ad where a girl’s explaining about how she’s got links to give to a client’s website. There are comments on it saying this is clearly black hat but they’ve replied to these comments and tried to argue it’s all completely ethical, that the links you pay for are high quality and everything’s going to be okay. Yet I remind you that it’s quite clearly against Google’s terms of service to pay for a link on a website to manipulate the rankings in Google.
I’m going to hold my hands up now and say yes, if you pay for links, it’ll work. Of course it will you get lots of links pointing at your website, so it’s going to have an impact. It’s going to increase your rankings, assuming the websites are halfway decent, but it’s like cheating on your taxes – yeah, it’s going to save you some money but eventually you’re going to get caught out and it’s going to cost you a lot more than you’ve saved.
So I implore anyone reading this, please DO NOT use one of these link sellers or link renters to point links at your website. Buying or renting links for the purpose of increasing your rankings in search engines is like playing catch with a live hand grenade – everybody’s having a good time until the hand grenade goes off and blows off your hands, and that is exactly what is going to happen.
This remains an important message because I keep getting asked about it all the time by clients and when I’m speaking to peers. They say “these people have contacted me and said I can increase my rankings if I pay for these links”.
So let’s get this out there now, one final time – if you pay for links, you probably will increase your rankings in the short term but you are jeopardising the long-term future of your website. If you do not care that your domain name your website could be irreparably burnt and never rank again, then by all means pay for links. If you care about the long-term future of your website and your domain, and you would like to see it in Google in one, two or five years’ time, then do not under any circumstances use one of these link sellers. It is not worth it.
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