Is buying backlinks worth it?
Short answer
No. Buying backlinks to raise rankings breaks Google's spam policies on link schemes. Google says its systems try to ignore such links, so the likely result is money spent on nothing. The worse result is a manual action against your site. Earned links from real local relationships are slower and safer.
Buying backlinks isn’t worth it: the practice breaks Google’s spam policies, and the most likely result is that you pay for links Google ignores. A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Paying for them in order to raise rankings is what Google calls a link scheme. The better outcome is wasted money. The worse one is a manual action against your site, which can push it down the results or take it out of them until the problem is cleaned up.
What Google’s rules say
Google’s spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam. That covers paying money for a link, trading goods or services for one, and sending someone a product in return for one. Excessive link swaps and software that creates links in bulk fall under the same policy.
Paying for advertising or a sponsorship isn’t against the rules. Google asks only that a paid link be marked as sponsored in its code, so it isn’t counted as an endorsement. A marked link can still bring you customers. It’s simply not a purchased ranking. The policy wording changes from time to time, so read the current spam policies in Google Search Central before relying on my summary.
What tends to happen to bought links
Most likely, nothing. Google says its systems try to identify spammy links and ignore them, without the site owner doing anything. If that works as Google describes, a bought link has no effect in either direction, and the only loss is the fee.
The less common result is a manual action. A reviewer at Google decides the site has unnatural links and applies a penalty by hand. It shows up in the Manual actions report in Google Search Console, and lifting it means getting the links removed and asking Google to review the site again.
There’s a plainer risk as well. The seller controls the links. Stop paying and they can disappear, and a site that sells links to you sells them to anyone, so your link may sit next to businesses you wouldn’t want to be associated with.
How to spot bought links in an SEO proposal
Link buying is rarely called that. Look for these signs:
- A fixed number of links per month for a fixed fee.
- A price list sorted by a third-party score such as domain authority.
- A refusal to say in advance which sites the links will be on.
- A “private network” of sites the seller owns or controls.
- Guest post packages on sites that publish on any topic.
- Reports listing links from sites with no connection to your trade or to San Diego.
Ask which sites, why each one would link to your company, and whether anyone is being paid for the link.
What to do in place of buying links
Earn links that exist for a reason. For a home-service company those come from manufacturers, trade associations, suppliers, local organizations and local coverage. It’s slower, and nobody can honestly promise a number per month. This is the link building I do, and for sources close to home, local link building.
What to do if you already bought links
Stop paying for them, then check before doing anything else. Open the Manual actions report in Search Console. If it’s empty, there’s usually no need for a cleanup project. Google says most sites don’t need its disavow tool, the form for asking Google to disregard specific links. Before using it, find out what a toxic backlink is and whether to disavow links at all.