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Massive Link Purchasing

Oh the lure of easy traffic! Just buy your way to the top using a fast and simple service that only costs you half an arm and a small bit of your leg.

And then you don't even find out until later that it didn't work, and still later the whole horror of the thing comes home to roost when your site gets banned from the search engines, and you must now scrounge traffic or pay for it.

The purpose of buying links is to gain more natural search engine traffic, by increasing your pagerank. Pagerank goes up when you have more inbound links (links coming into your site). Higher pagerank means you come out higher in the listings, and get more traffic from searches. These are visitors you don't have to go looking for, because they are looking for you.

Search engine traffic is worth getting, because it costs you nothing. So people figure if they spend a bit to get some permanent links, and those links boost their rankings, they'll benefit from it permanently.

In theory, its sound reasoning. In practice, there are some caveats.

If you purchase a whole bunch at a time, the search engines view that as being unnatural, and will either ignore the links (meaning you just wasted your money), or ban you (meaning your grand plan backfired). Experts disagree on what, exactly, the search engines do when you have a whole bunch of links that show up overnight. But either consequence is not a good one if you paid good money for the links.

Purchasing just a few each month - say, less than 100 - is considered Gray Hat. In other words, nobody really knows whether it will get you into trouble or not, because nobody knows where the red flag goes up to alert the search engine that you have too many at once. Many experts feel that purchasing low amounts of them, IF you purchase them from sites that are selective about whom they allow to advertise AND you purchase them on relevant sites (the most effective advertising anyway), is not going to raise red flags.

Purchasing links is risky above a certain amount, and pretty much a waste if you do too much, too fast. Again, there are no quick and cheap solutions, and even some of the expensive ones are not a good idea.

Article Marketing is free, and can give you viral marketing benefits as well. Combine it with Paid Inclusion on a directory network and you can avoid the risks of text link purchasing if you need to build your site faster than would be wise with purchasing links. It looks more natural, and won't raise red flags.

The best way to gain links to your site is to create great content that people want to link to. See Google's Guidelines for more.

Contributors: Laura Wheeler, EBWS