Buy Backlinks and Win in 2024 [A Comprehensive Guide]
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What's The Deal With Backlinks & SEO in 2024?
SEO is a game of cat-and-mouse where web admins constantly try to outdo each other and the Google algorithm. Link-building strategies are just one of the tactics professionals have in their toolbox to help them achieve success in search results.
Read through blogs and videos on how to capitalize on link-building strategies, and you’ll eventually run into a firm offering links for sale. But is it worth buying backlinks for your site? Won’t that get you in trouble with Google? The last thing you need is your hard work suppressed in search rankings because you took a chance on buying backlinks.
Great news! You can boost your SEO results and visibility of your online business through purchasing backlinks – but there’s an art to pulling off this strategy successfully. Let’s give you the low-down on buying backlinks and show you how to do it the right way.
Why Top Websites Buy Backlinks for Their SEO Strategy
Understanding the concept of buying backlinks isn’t rocket science; it’s pretty straightforward. You place a backlink on another site, and it points to yours. Some backlinks cost a pretty penny, while others are dirt cheap, and some might even be free.
The backlink boosts your organic traffic when users on the host site click on it, and their browser is directed to the page the backlink connects to. It’s that simple. The cool thing about this strategy is that the more backlinks you have floating around the internet on high-quality websites, the more the Google algorithm identifies your site as an authority in your niche.
It’s a way Google determines if your site adds value to the community and if it’s worth promoting to users when they make search requests. Essentially, you’re gaming the system. You make your site rise up the rankings like a Phoenix soaring to the sky after rebirth from the ashes of obscurity.
Sounds good, right?
Hang on – before you get overexcited thinking you’ve found the “Holy Grail” of SEO strategies, there’s a bit of nuance attached to executing a backlinking strategy correctly. It’s a do-or-die tactic that can make or break your website. So, learning the right approach to backlinking is the be-all and end-all of making it work.
Will the Google Algorithm Have an Issue If I Buy Backlinks?
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room – the Google algorithm. Google themselves state in their webmaster guidelines that backlinking isn’t a good idea. Before you throw your hands in the air and stop reading, give us a sec to unpack this a bit.
If the Big Goog says backlinks are a no-go, why are some of the biggest online companies investing hundreds of thousands of their marketing dollars into this strategy?
Because it works.
Despite what Google wants you to do with your SEO strategy, backlinking is a valid component if you know how to execute it correctly. The key to backlinks is adding value to the community you serve. If you can pull that off, you’ll escape penalization by the algorithm and you’ll see your pages and site fly up the rankings at a speed that leaves your competition in the dust.
While they’ll never admit it publicly, Google silently gave up on pursuing its policy of punishing sites for using backlinks a while ago. That’s not to say you can go out and purchase a whack of backlinks and see your site fly through the rankings.
If the algo identifies your links as part of a scheme, they devalue them, rendering them useless, and your SEO efforts moot.
Unpacking the Nuances of the Skyscraper Backlink Strategy
Let’s take a time warp back to the days when backlinks were all the rage with SEO strategies. Sure, it might have only been five years in the past, but let’s face it – that’s like a million years in internet time.
Have you ever heard of “The Skyscraper Strategy?”
This technique was among the most effective backlinking SEO strategies that every web admin and their gremlins were using to master search. The approach involves finding trending content online, rehashing it into a version that adds more value, and presenting it to other sites for linking opportunities.
Simple enough, wouldn’t you say?
The principle of the technique revolved around the idea that site owners want to link to high-quality resources to improve the ranking authority of their own site. Brian Dean of Backlinko invented this strategy, and it paid serious dividends for webmasters using it. Today, many savvy web admins rely on this innovation to help them conquer search rankings.
Brian unveiled the concept as “the tallest skyscraper on the skyline gets the most attention.” So, in essence, the site garnering the most attention gets the best search ranking. Links are like the bricks in a skyscraper. The more of them you have strewn across your site, and the better the quality of the bricks (links in this case), the more attention you get from the Google algorithm.
Content is the backbone of the Skyscraper technique. The more value your content presents to the community, the more Google sees it as adding value to the internet as a whole. With high-quality Skyscraper content and enough backlinks, it’s not long before your site and webpages start rocking to the moon.
Speak to any webmaster worth their salt, and they’ll tell you that the skyscraper strategy works. It’s a time-tested principle that is still paying dividends for many sites in the modern search environment. This technique drives referral traffic from the host site to yours, and every click makes a difference in how the Google algorithm positions your site in search results.
Right now, Google plays the game of the more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more authoritative the perception of your site and pages. Remember, it’s all about adding value to the community.
If your backlinks get thousands of clicks due to high-quality content and excellent positioning on trustworthy sites, the more it reflects what Google thinks your site will add to your niche. Some of the reasons why the Skyscraper backlinking method towers over other strategies include:
- You leverage the traffic visiting authority sites.
- It encourages the creation of content that meets Google’s EEAT principles.
- You capitalize on links previously pointing to competitor pages or sites.
- It’s a highly scalable strategy, building success with every brick (link) you place on the skyscraper.
What Can I Expect to Pay for Backlinks?
So, we’ve covered (and hopefully convinced you) that backlinking is still a viable strategy in today’s modern SEO environment. But what will this cost you? As you know, nothing’s free in the world of SEO, and it’s going to take more than effort and elbow grease to get your site and pages to the top of search using backlinking strategies.
As the legendary hip-hop supergroup Wu-Tang Clan put it – C.R.E.A.M. “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” and that’s something you need to pay attention to when planning your backlinking strategy. So, what’s it going to cost you to get your backlinks up and running?
Why Do Websites Want to Charge You for Backlinks?
Website owners understand the value of backlinks to online businesses. They know you’re willing to pay top dollar for links if you think they’ll benefit your business. So, in a capitalist market, you can expect to pay for the privilege of hosting your backlinks on their site. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just part of the game.
For instance, you might spend thousands of dollars on a permanent backlink on a site like Vogue Magazine. But these industry authorities aren’t the only ones capitalizing on the desperation of webmasters who want to make their sites shine.
There are tens of thousands of bloggers offering backlink opportunities. If you want to see it for yourself, just check out a “blogger income report.”
What are Blogger Income Reports?
Some bloggers doing well in their niche earn upwards of $15k per month from hosting backlinks on their sites. Sounds crazy, right?
The blog income report (BIR) provides data on the cash top-earning bloggers earn and how they do it. Learning to leverage BIRs provides insight into online trends, popular niches, partnerships, and programs you can use to rake in cash using your website.
BIRs offer data-backed insights and evidence from newbie bloggers and veterans in the content creation game. These powerful reports feature information on the blogger’s revenue-harvesting performance over weeks, months, or years.
Blog income reports vary in their information, but most feature the following three data sets.
Income – Their earnings are categorized by source (blog, website, or platform) and total revenue.
Monetization – Did the blogger use affiliate, advertising, partnership, subscription, or product sales to make their money? This section also includes information on earnings ratios for strategies and which were the most successful for the blogger.
Expenses—The costs of running their blog, including commissions, salaries, subscription renewals, and any data relating to the cost of sales. (The data won’t include taxes.)
Some BIRs are from bloggers with single platforms, while others feature curated data from various niches contrasting the performance of each site.
This concept segues us into our next section on PageRank.
Understanding the Google PageRank Algorithm
Remember how we talked about Google implementing algorithms to determine the authority of webpages and the value they add to the community as a ranking parameter? Well, PageRank is the algo they use to achieve it.
The PageRank algo issues every webpage on the surface net with a score of 1 – 10. No prizes for guessing the score you want for your pages. According to the EEAT principles in Google’s content creation guidelines, the more value the page adds to the community, the better its score.
The bottom line is that choosing to buy backlinks for your pages and site depends on how you perceive the points we discussed so far, your risk tolerance for PageRank scores, and how fast you want to grow.
So, let’s get into how to buy backlinks and win with your SEO strategy. We’ll look at what strategies to consider and which to avoid like the plague.
Buying Backlinks – Understanding the Risk & What to Avoid
Like any money-making strategy online, buying backlinks comes with a certain level of risk. There are two reasons why you might want to avoid buying backlinks.
Reason #1 – You Might Blow You Marketing Budget and Get Nothing in Return
Using conventional, outdated link-buying strategies on directories and forums won’t impact your ranking in search results. It’s not that Google will penalize you for using this tactic, it’s just that the algorithm ignores these links, rendering them pointless (no pun intended).
Reason #2 – A Human Google Review Agent Might Penalize Your Pages
Google has a team dedicated to manually reviewing links. If they come across your backlinks and decide they’re against the guidelines, they’ll penalize you – hard. Your pages will plummet from superstardom to obscurity overnight, undoing all your work.
The team might even remove your site from Google in the worst-case scenario. But relax. It’s rare to find instances of manual link reviews in the modern SEO environment. The algorithm does most of the heavy lifting for Google these days and just ignores low-quality or spam links.
Now that you know the risks of buying links, let’s discuss methods to successfully execute this strategy. The task has two approaches – “Black Hat” and “White Hat.” We’re not even going to go there with black hat strategies in this post, just forget you read that part, but we’ll discuss them briefly in a little bit to give you an idea of what to avoid.
A “white hat” backlinking campaign is where it’s at, Jack. To qualify as white hat, the campaign must follow this protocol.
- Devise your backlinking strategy.
- Reach out to candidate authority websites.
- Successfully negotiate a link placement with the owner.
- Create high-quality content to host the backlink in line with the site’s content policy.
We can hear what you’re about to ask next before the thought even passes through your mind. But what about those services you’ve seen online offering you dozens of link placements for pennies?
The reality is there’s no free lunch in SEO. Any service offering you this deal takes shortcuts, and you’ll end up burning yourself if you use them – don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Avoid Buying Spam Backlinks from Freelance Sites
Search through service or freelance websites like Fiverr, and you’ll find a ton of people offering backlinking services for cheap. Sure, some of them might be decent, but it’s not worth the risk, and you’re essentially looking for a needle in a haystack with these providers.
Real backlinking strategies that yield high-quality results cost money. A significant amount of work goes into the process, and the outcome is not guaranteed in most cases. It’s simply not possible to offer them for the price that some of these providers claim they can provide.
Skip the Allure of Buying Links from PBNs
Many of these cheap service providers can afford to sell their back linking services for next to nothing because they access a private blog network (PBN). They own a site network where they’ll place your links, giving you hundreds or thousands of backlinks in just a few hours. They finish the job, and you pay them, and then you wonder why your site and pages are moving down the rankings, not up.
Low-Quality Backlinks Will Sink Your Site
By now, you’re hopefully starting to see the problem with low-cost, low-quality linking services. These providers also generate huge quantities of backlinks using auto-generated content on forums, low-value blogs, or directories. It might seem like you’re getting a good deal, but these links will leave your site in the gutter.
The Niche Edits Backlinking Strategy – Is It Worth It?
Let’s move on to link-building strategies that work. First, let’s discuss the sub-optimal options. These strategies work but don’t provide the same results as the best option we’ll go through in a moment.
Niche edits let you buy links by reaching out to website owners who sell links. You ask them to place a permanent link on their site pointing to a specific page on yours. For instance, they place your logo on their site and a link to your homepage. Google has a hard time spotting this type of link and differentiating it from organic links.
While this might seem like a good strategy, you need to ask yourself how many other sites are using the originating website for the same purpose? If the website owner does it too often, Google will eventually catch on, classifying them as a “link farm.” If that happens, it’s down you go in the search rankings.
Building Backlinks with Guest Posts – Is It Worth It?
This strategy is similar to niche edits but a little more powerful. You’ll write a high-quality piece of content and submit it to an authority site. Their editorial team reviews your post to see if it meets their editorial guidelines and publishes it in their blog feed or a section dedicated to guest posts.
Your post will feature “anchor text,” a keyword phrase related to the page content the link points to. When the reader clicks the link, they go to your site. For instance, you could own a site selling kids’ toys. You write a post on the top-selling kids’ toys for this Christmas and insert your link in a keyword phrase like “baby dolls,” pointing to a sales page for baby dolls on your site. Does that make sense?
It’s a great strategy for buying high-quality backlinks. Like the niche edits strategy, it has a few downsides, and you could risk losing your ranking if Google decides to penalize the host site. There’s also the cost to consider. Some sites charge a fortune for these links, and others will do it for free, provided you offer high-quality content that adds value to their reader experience.
Building Links with Sponsored Content – Is It Worth It?
This link-building strategy is safe, effective, and popular with website owners. You create a high-quality blog post and pay a website to host it on their platform in their primary blog section. At first glance, the reader will think it’s a post from the blogger or their team that they’re used to reading.
It might sound similar to guest posting, but there are a few key differences. The blogger will clearly indicate it as a “sponsored post” by using the rel=“sponsored” or rel=“nofollow” tags on the link. This tag shows the Google algorithm; it’s a sponsored post, and you paid for the privilege of posting it on the site. Unfortunately, it also means the post gets a low PageRank score, making it a low-value link.
While sponsored posts won’t earn you a PageRank score, they can generate organic traffic for your site. This benefits you from increased brand exposure, and you might find other sites sending you follow links.
The Verdict on Link Building with Niche Edits, Guest Posts, & Sponsored Posts
Using these strategies is a far better approach to backlinking than using black hat concepts such as PBNs and mass low-quality link purchases. But remember, the strength and results of your strategy depend entirely on the authority and quality of the host site in the eyes of the Google algorithm.
If the algorithm decides the host site is a link farm or devalues the content on the site because it hosts rubbish, low-quality articles, or links, you’ll experience the fallout from the penalty. That applies even if you paid for the link.
So, complete your due diligence on the host site before committing to placement. Look for sites posting high-quality content with good transparency on ownership and operations. Review how much traffic flows to the site and the audience engagement it receives with its content strategy.
Paying an Agency for Backlinks – Is It Worth It?
As a newbie to link building, why do it yourself when you can have professionals do it for you? Think about it for a second. If your car broke down, would you try to fix it yourself or send it to the auto repair shop?
So, with this example in mind, why trust the fate of your online business to yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing? Hiring an agency gives you access to a team of professional content creators and SEO experts who have already mastered the game. They know where to place links and how to create content that attracts the attention of visitors and the Google algorithm.
Provided you’re working with a high-value agency that doesn’t use PBNs or low-value AI-generated content, you’re on the right side of the algorithm. Like the previous strategies we discussed, the success of hiring an agency depends largely on your due diligence of their work and the services they offer.
How to Conduct Due Diligence on Backlink Agencies
Working with the right agency makes all the difference in your backlinking strategy and the success of your SEO strategy. Choosing the right team means you won’t have to spend nights sweating bullets and losing sleep wondering if Google will penalize your site.
Here’s how you conduct effective due diligence on a prospective backlink agency.
Step #1 – Review the Agencies Website
Does the agency’s website receive good traffic? How do they rank on Google? A good ranking shows that they practice the principles they preach and offer solid services.
Step #2 – Ask if they Use Paid Links
Do they use paid links? If so, where do they place those paid links? Are they high-value sites, or are they gaming you with PBNs?
Step #3 – Discuss Their Backlinking Strategy
What backlinking strategies are they using? Do they execute the white hat strategies we discussed? If so, which are their primary focus, and how will they spend your budget?
Step #4 – Examine the Company’s Case Studies
Who has the agency worked with? What kind of results did they get for their clients? What do the case studies say about the strategies they used to get those results?
Step #5 – Look for User Reviews & Testimonials
Look at what companies are saying about the agency on social media and the results they received working with them. Don’t trust on-site testimonials. They’re easily faked. Look for real testimonials on X or Facebook.
While these due diligence steps are essential to selecting the right agency, run for the hills if you come across any of these red flags. Here’s our 3 top tips –
- The Promise of Guaranteed Success—No matter what anyone tells you, link building is not guaranteed to succeed. If an agency promises guaranteed link placement and results, they’re likely using a PBN.
- Fast Outcomes—Real agencies can take a few months to complete your backlinking strategy. If a company says it can do it in a week or two, it’s nonsense.
- Suspiciously Cheap Pricing Schedules—Link building takes time, resources, and effort, and the agency rate card should reflect this.
Buying Backlinks in 2024 – Key Takeaways
Wrapping up, we must reiterate that the jury is still in session regarding whether it’s a good idea to buy backlinks for your SEO strategy. While that’s true, thousands of high-value websites are currently using this strategy, and it’s yielding outstanding results.
The key to success is in the execution. Plenty can go sideways if you’re inexperienced with link-building strategies. Sure, you could do it yourself, but is it worth the risk of flagging the Google algorithm?
If you want real results for your online business, work with a reputable, experienced agency. Contact the team at Worldwide Backlinks to discuss how we can make your dreams of ranking at the top of search results a reality.
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