Following Matt’s SEO ethics post and having had many interesting discussions about buying links with some SEO’s recently, I thought it would be interesting to run a quick anonymous poll to find out whether buying links still has a part to play in your SEO strategy.
So here goes:
Poll now closed – please see our results post
This is intended to show what is actually happening in the industry, perhaps against best practice advice – so I think it will be interesting to see the results. Obviously this is an anonymous poll and only vote information is collected. If you’d like to show us examples, feel free to leave them in the comments. But I’d probably advise against it to be honest!
Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.
Very interested to see the results of this – suspect a high percentage will still buy links but not as a fundamental part of link building. Now it’s all about quality, relevance and diversity of links. Paid links is still a part of it though.
It is funny how many SEO’s preach about the negative effects of link buying, and yet the majority of them probably buy links on a regular basis. Purchasing quality links is key to outsourcing some SEO work. If you buy links that are junk and have little value as well as a large link footprint, you are raising a red flag to Google and they will penalize you. I am sure the majority of SEO’s have purchased links in some form or another at some point in their careers.