Friday, February 18, 2011

Do Paid Links Hurt Your Website SEO?



Paid links are again being look at regarding search engine optimization for your website. Until recently J. C. Penney had a number 1 ranking for numerous competitive keywords. How did they get that accomplished? Come to find out that their website received these rankings by way of purchasing links on over 2000 pages.

Google discovered those paid links and many of J. C. Penney's rankings fell from number 1 to number 70 and below.

What is the definition of a paid link?

Plain and simple- if you pay the webmaster of some other site to link to your particular website, then the backlink you received from them is a paid link. Paid links are allowed by Google to advertise your website as long as the paid links make use of the rel=nofollow attribute.

Where you get into trouble is when paid links are employed to get higher rankings in the organic search results on search engines such as Google.

Google is not misunderstood when it comes to using paid links to manipulate search engine results.

Google does not like paid links. Their official statement is avoid paid links at all cost!

[Some] webmasters employ the tactic of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, regardless the quality of the links, the origins, and the long-run affect it will have on their sites. Purchasing or selling links that pass PageRank is an infringement Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively affect a site's ranking in search results.


Should you use paid links to advance your website?

The problem with paid links is that they do actually work. As long as no one notices that you're purchasing links, paid links can have a positive effect on the search engine rankings of your website. However, once Google discovers the paid links your website can get in major trouble.

There are numerous problems with paid links:

* Your competition could report your paid links to Google and your website will be penalized.
* Your competition might actually buy links that point to your website; report the paid link to Google and then you will be penalized.
* A competitor buys links to a throw away domain, determines where they appear, drops the links and waits for you to buy them. Then the competitor reports you to Google for purchasing paid links.

While paid links can indeed improve your page rank with Google, they are also exceedingly risky. If you plan to establish a successful business, you should totally avoid paid links. The potential harm to your website exceeds the benefits by far.

Your website must have backlinks to produce high rankings on Google

Backlinks are very important to produce high rankings on Google. That's why Google works so hard on filtering the wrong kind of links.

The links that point to your website should be from related websites and they should contain the keywords for which you want to get high rankings. Do not manipulate the links to your website by buying links and do not join automated link systems to increase the number of links to your website.

If you want lasting results, concentrate on ethical search engine optimization techniques. There are several methods to get good links (related websites, blogs, social bookmark sites, directories, etc.). My Site Launcher can help with all of them.

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