According to a recent survey of 113 SEO experts, conducted by EditorialLink, 92% of them believe that their competitors are buying backlinks for their websites. This survey began a debate about whether buying backlinks for SEO (search engine optimization) is a good or bad thing.
In general, buying backlinks means that SEOs are breaking Google’s rules as paid links can lead to penalties from Google and search rankings can also drop. Google uses links to determine the relevancy of web pages. If your (bought) links are manipulating Google search results, those links are considered spams.
Many SEO experts believe that buying backlinks won’t have much impact on their rankings but it’s a risky move. The best way to make your website rank in search results is by adopting organic strategies given by Google as manipulating the links can have long-term effects on your rankings. Ahrefs’ research says that buying backlinks has become a norm among SEOs because building backlinks in an organic way is hard and takes a lot of time and patience. Only 12.6% of websites they reached out to were willing to sell the links and about half of them wanted a fee. Selling links is quite common in insurance, finance and gambling niches as they are quite competitive.
Many websites are earning a good revenue from selling links. This means if someone wants to buy a good link, they have to pay a good amount for it. Websites which have a decent domain ratings often sell their links to make money with an average of $361.44 on competitive niches and $77.80 on guest posts.
EditorialLink also studied the effects buying backlinks causes on websites. The research showed that more than 40,000 websites which were selling backlinks saw a huge decrease in its traffic. Only 6.6% or 2,021 websites had some traffic increase. Most of the websites which were charging money for links were penalized by Google.
If you have bought any links for websites, it is a good idea to disavow them. You can use Google Disavow tool to get rid of links that you have bought for your websites. The research also showed that only 31% of SEOs use Google Disavow while 69% do not use it. John Mueller answered SEOs questions about using Google Disavow tool and told them that they shouldn’t be concerned about using the tool. Focus on building your own organic backlinks and invest in ethical/white hat SEO strategies.
