I believe that you should differentiate between good and bad paid links.
Good paid links: β’ Trusted media (like newspapers) writes a sponsored article with real value β’ Sponsor links. Example: You pay to sponsor a football club and get a link on their website. β’ Good real blogs where you pay to write a nice guest post. β’ Memberships of clubs/networks/organizations that also link to you β’ Donations that also provide links to donor companies. β’ Paid organic (yeah that's a thing) media appearances
Bad paid links: β’ Spammy blog links that provide no real value to the internet (many Private Blog Networks (PBN)s fall into this category) β’ Links within paid articles that are not tagged "sponsored" even though they are. β’ Links and content that is deceiving. β’ Really any kind of paid link that provides zero value to the internet is a bad paid link IMO
NoseGrindstoned I have no issue with good paid links. I appreciate there are people that have the job of maintaining connections with companies/admins/bloggers, and then using those connections to gain advantages in marketing.
I think the industry of paying for links to place into high Domain Authority (DA) sites is overpriced.
madsenmining βοΈ Yeah might be overpriced. Especially high DA prices. But what is the alternative? Google/Facebook ads are also increasing in price like crazy in most industries.
NoseGrindstoned I think the alternative is to be the one that gains the backlinks. Hire a pro versus do-it-yourself.
What's frustrating to me about pricing in the advertising space and social media marketing space and influencer marketing space, is that some are charging for the perceived potential. I prefer to work with the ones that charge for hours doing the work + their current network. I want to pay for someone who spent the time in the past to gain certain connections and also will work on the gig. I don't want to pay for someone who says "I have 1 million followers and a blog that gets 50000 views a day, therefore I declare you pay me $10000 because you may be going to get $100000 in sales."
xfd My opinion as a link builder is that it's a necessary evil. Sites are getting spammed to death by 1000s of people a week asking for a free link. It takes time to add content to your site, respond to emails, negotiate, etc. Free links also cost you something else, time.
By paying you cut to the chase and get what you want. I don't see a problem with it as long as you know how to vet a paid link. You don't need to spend a lot of $ either to get good links, you just need to know where to look.
Unless Google penalizes half the internet for paid links, then it'll never go away. I do think that without paid links the internet would be a better place, but it's up to Google to figure out how to discount paid links. I don't believe Google can tell the difference right now, but maybe in the future, they will be.
madsenmining βοΈ Makes sense. Smart way to see it.
I also think Google would in that case just ignore paid links. Which means the links would be worthless but not directly hurting your SEO as many people fear. And my logic is that since paid links are so common and in all sorts of websites, even some of Google's own websites would be penalized if they brute forced a hard penalization.
xfd How can they truly enforce it without the risk of harming sites that don't do any linkbuilding? I'm not sure they will ever be able to get around smart paid links. madsenmining βοΈ Agreed – it's just super complex even for smart humans to figure it out
IamNotMike They do have ways to spot obvious link sellers.
Like if a site suddenly starts linking to various new niches which are unrelated, and somethings those website who pay might already be flagged.
It's less obvious on very big "news" websites though.
They've also done a lot of manual flagging before, going after link seller websites/networks.
xfd You're assuming a lot. If it were true, link farms that I'm aware of wouldn't be pulling in 10s of thousands of traffic if it were that easy. madsenmining βοΈ Would be awesome to get some kind of proof here. But I do believe you have valid points. Just don't see the data or the proof :)
ClickedMarketing I have no issues with paying for links. I look at it as any other advertising medium. If I wanted to put a billboard up outside, I would have to pay for it. If I wanted to send out mailers, I will need to pay for them. If I wanted a page in your magazine, I will be paying for it.
Only issue I have is people selling links based on Domain Authority (DA). Anyone selling links based on DA is either incompetent or a scammer. Their incompetent because they do not understand that DA, besides being a massively inaccurate metric, has nothing to do with the strength of the page your link will actually appear on, or they do know that and they are doing it anyhow, which makes them a scammer because they are preying on people who don't know any better.
madsenmining βοΈ Agreed! What do you think about the URL value metric? Moz, Ahrefs and other link tools each have their metric for the landing page url value and not the entire domain. Is that metric in any way accurate?
ClickedMarketing It's better. At least it is trying to evaluate things at the page level.
However, if your link is on a new page, you won't know the URL level metric for it. madsenmining βοΈ Ah yeah true. That is a very good point.
AnonymousUser I don't have an issue paying for links, providing I can ensure I add value to the blog's readers with whatever is being linked to. Another stipulation is that the blog/website I am paying to link to me is high-quality too.
From a linkbuilding perspective, it's a necessary evil! From a site owner perspective, it's a good little moneymaker and you obviously have control over who you link to. ISells It is a go as long as you make you request your niche, you pass your keywords, and the links you want them to go after. It does take a while for them to show on href because of indexing slowness by google. When I build them, I built the basics of 3 layers of web2.0 underneath. Layer 1 is web2.0 about 12 of them with great related niche blog – Layer 2 is also web2.0 combined with Social related site. The Layer3 is where your site will be connected to combined with some more socials.
I built links for folks much time and will continue to them as long as they requested it. Yes, it is a healthy industry because there is a lot of tech work underneath. It is all about sending juice to your site and help your content rank. Some of you might disagree but it is proven and works.
