Buying Links: When It Makes Sense and What to Watch Out For

“We offer quality backlinks, 50 pieces for €200.” This offer arrives at companies regularly and the question behind it is legitimate: is buying links all right, or is it a scam? The answer is uncomfortably ambiguous: it depends on what exactly you are buying.

First the essential part: buying is allowed

A paid publication in a medium – that is, a PR article – is ordinary advertising and nobody forbids it. Companies have paid for space in newspapers for a hundred years and in online media it is the same. Google has nothing against it – it has one condition: a paid link must be labelled.

Concretely that means the attribute rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" on a link that was paid for. Labelling does not make the link worthless: it still brings readers just the same, and the mention in search and in AI answers too. All it says is that somebody paid for the publication.

The problem starts where this is concealed. Systematically buying unlabelled follow links is a violation of the rules and Google reacts to it – either by simply ceasing to count the links, or in the worse case with a drop in visibility for the whole domain.

Three ways links get bought

In practice you will run into three variants, differing in price and in what you risk.

The third one deserves attention. Websites created solely for selling links are quite easy to recognize: the content is machine-generated, the articles are unrelated to each other, there is no author or imprint and nobody reads them. Google has long recognized such networks and cuts the links from them off – often without notifying anyone. The money is gone and nothing happened, which is incidentally the most common outcome, not a dramatic penalty.

Eight warning signs

Before you reply to an offer, run it through this list.

Two signs mean it makes sense to keep asking. Four and more – do not buy, whatever the price.

When buying makes sense

There is no point demonizing it. A paid publication is, for most companies, the only realistic way to get into the media – newsrooms will not write about a company just because it exists. Concretely it makes sense:

• When you have something to say. A guide, your own data, a customer case. You are buying space for content that stands on its own.
• When the medium is relevant. An industry title your audience reads beats a big portal where your text interests nobody.
• When the text stays online. A permanent publication works for years; a yearly rental stops working exactly when it starts to pay off.
• When you can do the maths. Divide the price by your margin on one order – you get the number of orders it must bring over the whole time it is online. Usually it is single digits.

When, on the contrary, not

• When price is the main argument. Websites without readers are cheap precisely because nobody reads them.
• When it is to be kept secret. An offer built on the link not being labelled sells risk, not advantage.
• When you do not get a list. Without specific websites up front you have nothing to judge.
• When your website is broken. A link brings people to a page that does not serve them. First fix the destination, then buy the route.

What to do when you have already bought badly

Panic is unnecessary; in most cases nothing dramatic happens – the links simply carry no weight. The sensible procedure:

1. Stop continuing. That is ninety percent of the solution.
2. Try to have the links removed. With a serious operator it works; with link networks usually not.
3. Disavow only as the last step. The link disavowal tool is a sharp knife and wrong use harms more than a few bad links. It is meant for manual penalties, not for a feeling.
4. Invest in a few good publications. The best defence against a bad link profile is a profile where normal mentions prevail.

What to take away

You are not buying a link. You are buying space in a medium that has readers – and the link is a consequence. Look at an offer through this lens and most questions answer themselves: a website without readers has nothing to sell, a one-year publication has nothing to deliver and an offer without a list of websites has nothing to offer.

And a last test that takes a minute: open the website the link is offered from and read one article on it in full. If it cannot be read to the end, your customer will not read it either.

If you are starting out, start from the basics: what backlinks are and why they matter to your company. The whole course of a cooperation is then described in the article on how link building works.