I'm here to raise a question with you all today; there's a lot of requests around the forums, particularly this forum, about the best place to go and buy links. Firstly, what is the point? Why go and "buy" something which is freely available? Some simple application of creativity and determinination to read a thread or two and dig-up a few ideas. There's a tool called SocialMarker for example which is fantastic for speeding up and expanding your submissions to Social Bookmarking sites - I found that out yesterday and have used it to great effect. But more importantly is the end-game scenario - you are buying links in order to rank higher in the search engines, right? So shouldn't you be thinking what is in the interests of the search engines? The search engine business model is simply to provide the 'searcher' with the best, most relevant content that matches their search queries. The idea is that they will come back and use the search engine more often - which then opens up the gateway to advertising oppurtunities. The search engine then has to try and maximise the 'searcher retention' whilst at the same time driving traffic to advertisers and generating income. So where do links come into all of that? Links, as we know form a substantial part of search engines algorithms. Search engines work using mathmatical formulas called algorithms which can essentially acquire, filter and rank websites in it's index accordingly - but that mechanical system is nothing like a humans own judgement; crucial since the search engines users ARE human. Links are therefore the 'human judgement' element in rankings. Links have to be sewn by a human - and as notoriously lazy creatures, it's got to be worth the effort to link to. Think of it as a 'seal of approval', a mark of credibility for that webpage and website. But of course, people can manipulate the system. I could program a bot to go and spam thousands of blogs and forums and generate millions of links overnight (with the right tools), but that isn't credibility is it? Search engines can weed that all out - so does that mean they can determin what true credibility is? Probably yes! Search engines are in the BUSINESS of finding credible, quality sources for their search results. So how does buying links help your search engine rankings? It can't - surely? Substitute the word 'credibility' for links - you can't "buy credibility" can you.. I think this is a juicy topic for Digital Point since there are a number of venders of links on here and a number of people on here who invest heavily in buying links - some of you may say that it has effected your search engine rankings; but would you put your life savings on it? How many million other factors could have influenced rankings, outside of your control perhaps. You simply cannot tell black and white if buying links works. So if buying links cannot be proven to effect rankings, and by analysing the search engine model and drawing a logical conclusion says not to - why would you buy links?
Wow, buying link is what most business-oriented websites do. I think that most of the time, most of the owners of personal blogs are still trying to do the marketing work by themselves like posting comments with backlink instead of buying a lot of links.
Buying links as in advertising is not exactly what I'm getting at - I'm talking about buying links in order to influence search engine results. Adverts are no-follow across nearly all networks.
The title of your question is: "Why would Google care if you buy a million links?" 1) Links are seen, at least to some degree, as "votes" for a site. 2) If you buy them, they don't represent the opinions ("votes") of others about your website. 3) Therefore, search engines are not too fond of webmasters gaming the "vote" count by buying links. P.S. I'm not talking about legitimate advertising-motivated links.
Google earns billions of dollars per year from advertisers and the advertisers come to them because they are the biggest search engine. To maintain this lead they need to maintain quality for their results and they won't like it if anyone can manipulate the results by buying links.
Who said that buying links doesn't affect rankings? If you do it properly it can make a huge difference. Look at the online gambling industry for example, 95% of the incoming links for the top 20 positions are bought. It all depends on how you do it, it is a risky business and it can get you in trouble if it isn't done properly. The day that someone ranks in the top 10 for "sportsbook" "casino" "poker" etc. without buying a single link I'll agree with you. I'm not saying that it is necessary or you won't rank without buying links, it isn't recommended and unless you are 110% sure that you know what your are doing you should avoid it. But at the same time you can't say that buying links won't help.
If you buy links the right way, the search engine have no way of knowing it is bought or not. Of course it works, as with any other linkbuilding technique. However if you make a mistake you will have to take the consequences
lol, a million links? There is no right way to buy 1 million links without raising some kind of flag.
Great post yet a very puritan way of looking at things... IMO when a person carries out a link building exercise he/she is targeting for specific keywords which add to the relevancy of the results displayed to the human end-user. I agree with your point that buying links should not be confused as buying credibility, however in the internet marketing game good marketing firms or SEOs are able to place sites in preferred slots in search engine rankings. This may be relevant to the brick and mortar world where conventional marketing companies place their products in our minds by bombarding us with TV Ads or FMCGs force store owners to give their products premium shelf-spacing... If we all conformed to your way of thinking, then you would not see advertisements on TV of famous celebrities suggesting that you use a brand of a certain product which he/she may not particularly use in real life. I appreciate your post but do not agree with it in it's entirety... I agree that link-building has become a lucrative business and it's use is now comparable to Link-Farms from days of SEO Yore... However, if you opt out it now you are destined to fail as an SEO...
Don't confuse my arguement with paid advertisements or celebrity endorsement - that's quite obvious that gargantuan sums of cash are being passed across! I mean the sale of links from already seeded sources - if these sites are 'selling links' then how credible must there link quality be in Google's eyes? Editorial results are designed to be just that - editorial. Google works hard to separate the commercial nature of it's sponsored Adwords results compared to the free search results - so if you can 'buy' your way to the top on both, what's the point? You say yourself that is it risky - tell me if your website added true quality to Google searchers, then where's the risk? seosapien - I'd love to see a detailed range of gambling sites which you can prove a specifically influenced by the purchase of links - and not anything else like visitor popularity, keyword density etc.
Google cares if you buy links because that would mean you are taking money from an advertising budget which could have been spent on Adwords. While Google does care about their search results, they don't want anyone else making money from online advertising. And Google can swing their 1000 lb testicles around and smack people upside the head with them to stomp out the competition...
Buying links is proven to help rankings. Google is not a perfect system, and never will be. I don't buy links, but I know people who do, and they have had massive success from this, I can assure you. If I emailed a site related to mine and offered them $100 for a link on the home page, and they agreed, how would Google know? The reason I don't buy links is that IF Google did find out, then my site may be penalised. Many people do get away with it. My fear is that a competitor may smell this and report to Google. This happens far less than you think, but it would still cause me to sweat at night! But its not all danger. I remember Matt Cutts saying one time that buying links is OK if there is some quality control. For instance a quality directory that charges $30 for a human review, but will only accept quality sites, then it is a legitimate human vote in favour of that site, which is what linking is supposed to represent. In effect this 'review fee' is a payment for a link, but because the directory is not just accepting any old link, then it does say something about a site that is included. That's why those massive directories that Google must know about, such as Yahoo directory and BOW, have not been penalised. Wouldn't Google just strip them of their PR if they didn't want them to continue? Why buy links? Link building is a fairly slow process, but buying links is not. Providing you don't build links stupidly quick, and you use it as part of a strategy of your link building campaign, you can make fast gains though the rankings. The only way to meet this speed of success is with some genius viral marketing of some kind. I have had friends who have built several thousands of quality links in just a few months by mainly buying links. Traditional link building just can't do it at this speed.
It is a simple question. Someone buy link because it is a easy way to get backlink and improve the keyword SERP.
Well put, they are at the top of the chain and have full control over the online game. Some of us work all day to try and please google with our inbound links and back links. This shows how big they are, but it isn't like that is new news to anyone here.
You can easily search for any of this keywords: Sportsbook, sports betting, online casino, online blackjack, NFL betting etc. choose any of the top 20 results. Go to yahoo explorer and take a look at the incoming links, pick them randomly and if you can't see that those are paid links than I don't know what you consider a paid link. Celebrity endorsement is a great marketing strategy and link bait strategy but out of the top 1000 results for any gambling keyword (not related to POKER) maybe one or two companies have "bought" an endorsement. So no I'm not confusing your argument, the simple fact is that in some markets it is impossible to compete for rankings without buying links. The all point of "safely" buying links is doing it in sites that don't say it publicly and even so if you take a look at the incoming links for online gambling sites you you'll see that most of the sites providing links clearly offer them. (I use the online gambling market cause it is one of the clearest examples, but there are many others highly competitive niches that do exactly the same thing) Like I said before it is a risky business but don't be naive and believe that people don't buy links or the ones that do are automatically penalized from Google. If you analyze the top 10 rankings for almost any competitive keyword you'll find links that are "clearly" paid for.
How can we remain untraced by google if we sell links to others.. I mean by putting the link in footer or in any corner then can google bots still detect it..?
It generally depends, if you buy a link at a certain good spot on a popular website, then the answer would be yes. I would buy, but I get where your going with this, and I understand the case but it generally depends on your methods.