The ‘Paid Links’ Approach to SEO

In the quest for achieving higher ranks among search results, Linking plays a key role – apart from Key Words. Key Words indicate to Search engines that the contents in your website are relevant to the searched words while links underline the importance that your website commands. Both key words and links are vital for effective Search Engine Optimisation.

However, the linking business should not be carried too far in pursuit of success. This happens by a phenomenon commonly called “Paid Links”. In the world of e-commerce, it makes business sense to explore all avenues available to promote one’s website and products. Money and profitability drive most businesses and if linking is said to increase profitability, webmasters may be allowed to pursue the practice of trading in web links.

Buying and selling of links is a practice that is usually done to get exposure to one’s products and services. For instance, if there is an article in the web that mentions of travel, it may be a good business move for a travel agent to have a link set up from the relevant words in the article to his products and services. Naturally, this would involve costs and financial transactions. In short, this is part of e-commerce.

However, “Paid Links” becomes an unacceptable practice if the buying and selling of links occurs solely with the intention of pushing a website up the page ranks. It is common knowledge that links increase the search engines’ perceived value from a website and a website moves up the page ranks when there are a lot of external links to the site. But, that is not the whole truth. Search Engines analyse not just the quantity of links but also their quality.

In their hurry to get the websites up the page ranks, webmasters may not give due importance to the quality of links they purchase. Further, search engines also analyse the pages that link to web pages and look for relevance. An unstructured practice of Paid Links would not only be ineffective when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation but it would also be Self-Defeating in the long run, as the website would lose credibility and put its reputation at risk.

It is important to analyse the links that you buy, if Paid Links is a part of your web strategy – you wouldn’t want to squander your resources on unreliable links that may only lead to a loss of your site’s reputation in the long run.