Should You Invest in Links in 2023?

You may be familiar with the concept of buying backlinks but unsure whether you should really do so. If you want to buy backlinks cheap go to rankersparadise.com.

Buying a large number of "cheap" backlinks from questionable sources in an effort to artificially boost your website's rating is a Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique.

You're not performing off-site SEO right if you buy backlinks but have no say over where they're placed or what sort of content they'll appear in.

When you pay for a service to increase your exposure, brand awareness, and backlinks, things change a little.

In general, a backlink's worth decreases as its ease of acquisition increases.

Basically, this is how things work since Google and other search engines don't want to encourage spamming. However, connections from authoritative sources, such as government and academic websites, are notoriously difficult to manipulate and hence command a higher price.

An example of a website offering backlinks for sale

A bad example of the kinds of connections you want to stay away from

Here's Why You Shouldn't Buy Spammy Backlinks

Even though it's no longer efficient, you can still buy tons of backlinks for a very low price. Did you saw this advertisement before? Or maybe something similar to that?

This is when unethical SEO really begins. It's hard to think of a better example of a strategy for increasing search engine rankings via link building then this one. Such services often rely on "news" websites of dubious quality or "link farms" that connect to as many other services as possible.

The sites' content is often nonsensical, and the links they provide almost never work.

Google's View on Buying Links

The practice of paying for link placement is completely against Google's policies.

Google cannot promise that all so-called "link schemes" would adversely impact a website's search engine rankings since there are many different ways that this exchange of money might take place. As opposed to that, it warns that such actions "may seriously impair a site's search engine rating" (emphasis ours).

If an exchange of money for a link is obvious and transparent, it will look artificial. In general, Google will punish content for seeming "unnatural" if enough people complain about it. Google uses "can" instead of "will" because certain paid-for link schemes are spammy even if they include the exchange of money, but there are other paid-for link strategies that do not fall into this category.

Why are there Follow links and No-Follow links?

The differences between internal and exterior connections have previously been covered. Additionally, there are two types of links: follow and nofollow.

Webmasters have the option of adding the nofollow attribute to inbound links. In this form:

rel="nofollow"

In 2019, Google has said that nofollow links would be treated more as recommendations than directives. Simply put, a nofollow link may or may not "count" in Google's eyes.

We don't know for sure why Google made this change, but it may have something to do with the fact that many authoritative sites have begun using the nofollow attribute on their links. Google implemented the change so that it would still consider backlinks from some of these news sites rather than completely discarding them as information sources. That being said, this is only speculation without any evidence to back it up.

Image of Google's Outbound Link Qualification Guidance

When should you utilize a nofollow link?

To illustrate when the nofollow feature is appropriate, Google offers the following example:

As Google puts it, "the nofollow feature is used when connecting to a website but do not want to imply any type of endorsement, including providing ranking credit to another page."

It's not only that Google tweaked the nofollow property; they also introduced a brand-new one called rel="sponsored.

If the link was created for commercial purposes, such as advertising or compensation, Google has specified that this feature be used (in other words, a paid-for link).