What Are Paid Backlinks?
"Backlinking" is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactic where other websites connect to your website through a text link. Search engine optimizers believe that backlinking increases the popularity of your website in organic searches, bringing more customers and visitors. Increased website traffic can increase profit, so many website developers and owners opt to increase backlinks through different means. One such strategy involves paying for backlinks. Before understanding paid backlinks, you need to understand the basic process of backlinking.
Other People Are Reading
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How Backlinking Works
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Search engines --- such as Google, Yahoo and Bing --- rank websites using several criteria that includes content, quality and popularity. Popularity is determined in part by the amount of other websites that are linking to your site. Backlinks, in their most generic format, are links from other websites that, once clicked, direct visitors to your website. If many websites are linking to your site, you get more visitors and your site becomes more popular in the eyes of search engines.
Organic and Paid Backlinks
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Organic backlinks are links to your website that other websites create because they liked your content or saw that your website is useful to their visitors. Organic links do not require website owners to exchange links with other websites. Search engine optimizers believe this to be one of the most powerful types of backlinking, although they can be difficult to accumulate. Since backlinks increase popularity, allowing even more traffic to your website, some companies and search engine optimizers are willing to pay people and other companies to increase their backlinks, bypassing organic backlinking. The concept of paid backlinking stems from this.
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Backlink Strategies and Paid Backlinks
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There are several ways to increase organic backlinks: submitting content to article sites, getting listed in website directories and posting comments in forums or blogs. Search engine optimizers call several alternative techniques "black hat," strategies which are not favored in the eyes of search engines as they usually involve some type of trickery. This might involve creating several websites, blogs and forums, followed by linking them to each other or linking to "linkfarms," or spam sites, that accept links without providing content or other services. Whether you are paying for each individual link or paying a service to include your link on hundreds or thousands of other websites, the process is considered paid backlinking.
Paid Backlink Downsides
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Google, the top search engines as of 2011, is known to discourage paid SEO strategies. Google released an official statement saying that "some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results." Paying for backlinks may increase the popularity of a website over the short-term, but the long-term negatives may cost a website indefinitely.
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