HI all, I recently used a well known company to buy high PR inbound links. Some of the inbound links are in completely unrelated industries. An "seo expert" has advised me this is very dangerous. He mentions "link farming" The sites are legit sites - they are just in different industries. Am I doing anything wrong?
Paid text links is against the Google Webmaster Guidelines; it can become a wasted investment if the site your purchased links from get penalized for it. Whoever this SEO expert is obviously doesn't know what a "link farm" is. W hat you did was buy a paid text link; link farms never have high pagerank values. Google Webmaster Guidelines Google's view of "link schemes" Google and Paid Text Links
Yes you probably didn't buy a link from a link farm. However buying links is dangerous because they are obviously not natural links. Google loves natural links.
yes I bought paid text links. Thanks for the clarification. I just deleted the 2 inbound links I was worried about. The others are all in the same industry and hold good PR - that should be ok right? If the company I bought from were to get penalised by Google, could this in turn effect my ranking?
Thanks for replies. they help. I suppose I should continue with directory submission / article submission and not thinking about paid short cuts.
high PR will not get you traffic or SERP benefit. it will just boost your site PR, thats all. as ssandecki said above, google is coming down hard on paid links so you need to be very careful where you buy your links from. you will be much better off geting low PR relevant backlinks than high PR backlinks that are not related to your site content
Lets not forget high Pagerank web pages obviously have more value backlink wise than lower Pagerank web pages. So Pagerank "can" be a consideration when building backlinks.
thats for sure, but my point was low PR backlinks which are relevant to your site content will give you much better result SERP wise than high PR links that are not within your site neighbourhood. for sure we need to shoot for high PR back links, but relevancy is also an important key
"Yes, you'll lose the value from that backlink; in turn that can effect yiour ranking." is that the only penalty?
I would be very cautious, I think it could harm your website, you have to add high pr links slowly, once a week
Try to get some free one way links using articles and web directories, also don't worry about PR, get a good blog uploaded on your web site that describes your ervices and discuss about latest trends in industry blogs really help in getting your site noticed in search engine results....
Nothing can hurt your site that happens outside your site. If buying links hurt a site rank, then people will start to buy links for their competitors in order to get them penalized. The site thats selling links can be penalized.
Apparently, "bad neighborhood" and other "outside aspects" might indeed hurt your rankings: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001544.shtml http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/why-is-negative-seo-becoming-more-common/ I didn't personally test these ideas but IMO both articles seem to present some valid points.