A Paid link or paid backlink is an inbound link to your website that you purchased from another website.
These links are meant to boost search engine ranking but are considered link schemes and violates search engine policies.
Providing compensation for these links, including link exchanges, is common in black hat SEO practice.
Paid links are used to influence search engine rankings. The more links you have pointing at your site, the higher your site can rank in the SERPs.
Buying a paid link is common in the SEO industry.
Paid links come in many different forms including:
It is important to note that not all paid links are bad!
Google provides a number of different link attributes so website owners can appropriately tag links on their sites. This helps Google understand the nature of the link.
This is to limit the number of websites that simply buy backlinks to improve their SEO and manipulate Google’s search ranking algorithm.
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What Will I Learn?
Paid links can be good for SEO as long as they are dofollow links and are naturally placed within relevant content.
Paid links are strictly against Google’s gudielines unless they are disclosed using the appropriate link attribute (rel=” sponsored”).
But any link marked with a “sponsored” or “nofollow” tag will not pass link equity and will usually be ignored by Google.
The biggest risk of paid links is Google finding out you paid for the link.
This will often result in the link being ignored by Google and you ultimately wasting your money.
In the worst case, Google may impose a penalty or manual action on your website, leading to a demotion in your search rankings or even being completely removed from the SERPs.
Like anything in SEO, you have to weigh the risks vs the benefits of paying for links. Many website owners do it and receive the SEO benefits.
The key is controlling the quality of the link you are paying for.
Google detects paid links with their algorithm that looks for unnatural linking patterns. They also look at site quality and signals indicating that a link was paid for.
It’s also common for Google to detect paid links through manual human reviews by their quality rater team.
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