The Grey Area Behind Paying for Backlinks. Should you do it?
Google’s guidelines on paying for backlinks.
Google’s guidelines are pretty straight forward. It talks about how websites:
Already meet the technical requirements to be indexed and ranked on Google. At least, most websites meet the bare minimum requirement without even realising it.
Should avoid spam policies and black hat SEO tactics like buying backlinks.
Stick to SEO on page optimization best practices.
The problem with 100% organic backlink building
As the Hoth puts it in this article about buying links, link building is extremely time-consuming. If you go the 100% organic way, it can take your website months or even years to develop an impressive link profile.
The problem with leaving backlink building to SEO agencies?
When you engage an SEO agency to do all the SEO work for you, ask yourself this:
Do you think they spend months helping 100s of clients write the most impressive content catered for each custom target audience?
Do you think they publish “skyscraper content”, ultimate guides and write articles in proven content formats as suggested by Brian Dean of Backlinko to attract backlinks?
The answer is no. (At least that has been the case for affordable ones that charge $3000 to $5000 for working on your SEO for 6 months.)
So what do SEO agencies do? And how do you know?
I have worked with 1 SEO agency in my past 9 years in business and have spoken to many other SEO agencies, so I know what they do:
They have a bunch of existing blog sites they write mediocre content on, which they use to link back to your website.
The problem with this strategy is that even though this isn’t exactly paying for backlinks, it almost looks as if you paid for them. Because the blog websites that most SEO agencies own are generic to cater to all of their clients.
Does that mean your website gets penalised by Google if you work with SEO agencies?
Most often not because these SEO agencies spread out the backlinks and don’t insert too high a volume of these backlinks all at the same time or all on 1 website.
So while this doesn’t affect your SEO negatively, it doesn’t help your SEO much either.
Only in very special and exceptional cases (I have yet to find one but you can check with your SEO agency) do SEO agencies own topical blogs that attract many visitors to get you relevant and high quality backlinks.
Only in very special and exceptional cases will SEO agencies be able to get high quality backlinks for you as well, because high quality backlinks are expensive to buy and challenging to earn.
According to Gotch SEO in this article, a “no follow” link placement on Inc. can easily cost you $1,500 to $2,000. Here is another 2023 link building pricing guide by a link building agency called linkbuilder.io which charges anywhere from $3000 to $20000 a month for high quality link building alone.
So unless the SEO agency own a high authority site themselves, how are they going to get a high authority site to link back to you for the price you pay?
Now that we know how challenging and time consuming it gets to earn high quality backlinks and how expensive it is to pay for high quality backlinks, what can you do?
My 5 Step Approach To Backlink Building.
Step 1: Make Sure Your On Page Optimisation SEO Strategy Is Up To The Mark
Download my free SEO starter guide here.
Look at my 5 step SEO framework on my Starter Guide to ranking on Google Page 1
Make sure you nail step 1 to step 4 extremely well.
Get feedback from a legitimate SEO expert on steps 1 to 4.
Get feedback from your customers on your blog content on your website.
Is your blog content well structured and easy to navigate?
Does your blog content add value to them?
Does your blog content stand out from other articles they can find from your competitors?
Does your blog content entice them to check out your products and services? Why or why not?
Only after you are sure you have nailed on page optimization (you can use this definitive guide here) should you even worry about backlink building.
Because if you don’t have outstanding content on your website, not even quality backlinks can earn you a top spot on Google. This is because website visitor signals are one of the most important elements Google looks at to verify if your website is really good.
Step 2: Look at free ways to earn backlinks.
Backlinko has 7 free ways to earn backlinks that will work in 2024 here.
The steps I have personally used are inside my free SEO Starter Guide.
Step 3: Learn to determine the quality of backlinks
This blog post by Woorank explains very clearly how to determine backlink quality. To put it simply, these are the 4 factors to look into to determine the quality of backlinks:
Anchor Text Relevance
Linking page domain relevance, domain authority and quality
Link placement location in the article
Traffic of website and specific web page linking to you (if possible)
Step 4: If you want to pay for backlinks, make sure you take note of these 5 pointers.
Never buy cheap links from Fiverr or anywhere else. They may not damage your SEO but they will not help your SEO either.
Focus on quality over quantity. 4 high quality backlinks will beat 100 lousy backlinks any day. Spread out these 4 high quality backlinks well. Example: 1 high quality backlink a month or 1 high quality backlink every 3 months.
Focus on diversity of backlinks. Rather than getting 4 high quality backlinks from the same website, get 1 high quality backlink from a high authority website, 1 high quality backlink from a topically relevant blog to your business, 1 high quality backlink from a local media website or guest blogger.
Focus on getting backlinks from high traffic generating, quality content websites.
Make sure your backlink is placed in an existing high quality piece of content or a high quality piece of content that will be created. A high quality piece of content is one that will add value to the blog content visitor.
Step 5: Consider Spacing Apart Your Link Building At Irregular Intervals
Instead of having 1 link a week or 1 link a month, build links at random time intervals.
This is especially important if you are paying for guest blog posts or niche edits.
Step 4 and step 5 is especially important if you are paying for backlinks but want to be as white hat as possible.
Remember.
There is just a thin line between white hat link building and black hat link building. I call it the grey area behind paying for backlinks. Should I term this as a grey hat link building technique? Let me know!
