It depends, if your are buying links for your a car insurance site in a flash programming site, it will look suspicious don't you think? Specially when these links are in the footer well hidden. IF you can buy contextual links better for you, those look natural.
As others have mentioned, the key is when search engines (Google) find out. There's an economic trade off going on there. If you're links are easily detectable, Google just might have a script to detect them, such as the car insurance link at the bottom of a Flash programming site. But if your links are natural in your content, and they were sold through you privately, it's going to be too costly for Google to figure out if the links are purchased or not. It's also going to be more expensive for you in terms of time to post them all manually. There's a company called Text Link Ads that got delisted by Google because they were apparently pretty good at getting links sold. I just checked, and they are back when I Google "Text Link Ads" so maybe they kissed and made up.
50/50... Depends on the websites you're buying links on. Check Age, OBL and other related factors. Thanks, Sarah
Just answer this question when you consider buying a link - Does this look natural in the eyes of the search engines? - if no, then you might want to leave it alone.
Well hidden as in using the display:none, visibility:hidden attribute or making the link color the same as the background? Stay clear from this, you'll be deindexed so quickly that you head will spin. But I might have misinterpreted your statement, please let me know if I did. Just trying to give a friendly warning because I've experienced it myself
I guess if you're buying links from sites not related to your niche, bad neighborhood sites and you are getting a lot of links in a day. For me the best way is to buy a blogpost links with related topic.
Sorry, but it doesn't matter how many links you get every day or what quality they are, it will never have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. If the links are low quality, Google will simply discount and devalue them and the worst thing happening in this case is you not seeing any ranking improvements. If YOU link out to bad neighborhood sites, that is an entirely different thing but when it comes to backlinks, your rankings either get a boost or nut, but they won't decrease. Why? Because it would be easy for your competitors to nuke you out of the SERP's by simply sending you lots of low quality links. Google knows that.
Quality is important if you want for you site to have a good reputation and become an authority site. Believe me when I say that number of links you are getting in a day/week/month will affect you in the long run. I experienced it myself, almost all of my top keywords were down to 400+ results. You should focus on getting quality backlinks and making it look natural in the eyes of search engines esp. Google.
I agree, quality is important if you want your site to rise so you should definitely pay attention to getting high quality links. But again, the amount of links does not matter, because your competition could easily nuke you out of the SERP's that way! Everyone would just start nuking their competitors and get easy rankings, sorry but it doesn't work that way. You must have done something else for having lost your rankings for so many keywords or Google didn't like stuff on your site anymore after an algo update or you force-pinged all your backlinks in one go, but there simply is nothing off-page that could affect your rankings in a negative way. I've done extensive testing here in the past years and I build millions of backlinks for clients every day, even in very competitive niches. They wouldn't come back if they lost rankings because of too many backlinks.
I'm now of the opinion that in general the answer is no. Otherwise it would be too easy for competitors to harm your status.
Any link can help/harm your site. If you talk to your friend and offering him money for links, it's unlikely those links could ever be noticed. If you submit to a huge directory known for selling links, it very well could harm your site. I would argue that generating valuable content with your own links is a better use of your time/money in the long-run, because you have more control and because those assets will be valuable for a while - no telling if the links you buy will be there in a year.
I agree with everything you said, but no link can harm your site (as long as you are not linking out to shady sites). If backlinks could actually harm your site, I could just grab your site and submit it to these spam directories you're talking about. The only thing that will happen in this case is that these links will be devalued, they will simply not contribute to your rankings, but they won't harm it either.
Nope, it won't google can't detect you are buying or not as people can create links they want to create
There is noting that actually says you can't do it, at the end of the day it's your site. However google may not like it too much, you may want to check there terms (especially if you have an ecommerce site and use google products listings)