Building links to your website is one of the most important aspects of Internet Marketing.

There is common myth that buying links is bad for SEO and will get you penalised by Google. In this article I will try to address this myth and explain why this is not necessarily the case.

Before we delve any further, it’s important to understand why people buy links?

Why Do People Buy Links?

Link building in general is a very important aspect of SEO. Businesses use several methods to obtain links. The main objective for this is to improve your search engine ranking. However, this is not the only purpose.

People buy links for two main reasons:

1. Purely to Influence Search Engine Rank (Followed Links)
2. Purchase links for the purpose of advertising and to drive traffic (No-Followed Links)

The former is one of the biggest link building mistakes, a black hat SEO technique, and can indeed get your website penalised by Google. However, the latter is considered a genuine marketing practice and your website will not get penalised by search engines as a result.

Buying links to influence search engine rank is frowned upon by search engines and should be avoided at all costs.

How to Differentiate Between The Two:

In terms of display, both types of links look the same and there is no real difference in the way links are displayed or how they work from an end user’s perspective. However there is a fundamental difference in link value and how they are viewed or treated by search engines.

The difference lies in the code. Genuine links purchased for the purpose of advertising and traffic generation are no-followed i.e. the link tag includes the attribute rel=”No follow”. It is applies to the code and is not visible to the human eye. It is however visible to search engines.

What is the purpose of NO Follow Links:

“No follow” links do not pass link juice or page authority to the destination page. It informs search engines that no link juice or ranking benefits are to be passed from the link source to the destination page. As such, there is no undue influence on the ranking of the page.

Buying this type of link i.e. “no followed” links is not considered a linking malpractice by search engines and as a result you are free from any risk of penalties.

Good Linking Practice – What types of links should be no followed?

It is generally a good practice to use regular followed links (without the “no-folllow” attribute) in your content when you are genuinely referencing or linking to a relevant page or website. It indicates value. It suggests that the site you are linking to is valuable and relevant to your content and linking to it contributes to the overall value of the discussion on your page.

It is only logical that you reward the page by passing some link juice from your page to the page you are linking to. And search engines follow suit by taking note of this, contributing to the authority and ranking of the page.

This allows search engines to rank websites in a natural manner and ensures page authority is calculated fairly and accurately. After all, it is only fair to assume that if you consider a given page valuable enough to link to, then it must possess real value and should be rewarded with higher authority.

On the other hand if you link to a website in return for a payment, it is correct to assume that you are not doing so because of quality or authoritative content but because of a financial reward. It is thus only fair that authority or link juice is not passed to the destination in such cases. Improper usage will devalue the quality of search engine indexing.

What Methods Do You Use?

What Link Building techniques do  you use for your website? We would like to hear from you. Please add your response by leaving a comment below.