Caution With Link Buyers


For many webbies it seems like a huge compliment: an agency wants to buy a link from your site and pay several hundred dollars for your service. No, they don’t just ask for their link to be placed on your site. Usually, they require you to publish a page or post on your site with an article they provide. Inside this article they place a link to their website(s). All you need to do is make sure that their article receives a link from your homepage and sitemap. This is commonly known as guest posting.

Sounds good? At first glance, yes, but it may end up being not so good. Why? Let me explain. Before Penguin and Panda updates shook adult websites out of search results people would just create their own satellite sites and use them for inbound links to their money portal. Satellites would be used as filters for seedy blackhat linking techniques. When successful satellites would generate traffic and authority for a main site as a linking partner. When such methods failed all they needed to do was remove links to their money site or kill their satellite and no harm would fall upon their main project. Today, Google has caught up to satellites that were just built for outbound links. Their value has been reduced. Now, link builders are looking for established sites to post articles with links. Link juice from old, authoritative websites is their goal. In an initial stage they will place articles geared towards their keywords on your website. Generally speaking, this wouldn’t be problematic at all. However, that’s not necessarily where the story ends. Often they will blast their articles and your site with very questionable methods of spammy link building. Those include forum spam, profile links and other blackhat SEO methods with xRumer and Scrapebox. Your site and their links will gain traffic for days and maybe weeks, but at the end search engines will catch up and de-value your website for webspam. As a result one can lose substantial parts of search traffic and be penalized for building artificial links. On various boards adult webmasters have reported warning messages from Google’s Webmaster Central and in some cases total de-indexing from search results.

Is it worth it? Probably not. This highlights the importance of trust in any business relationships. This is true for business in general, but this rings especially true for online businesses and partnerships. The separation of not dealing with someone in person makes it easier for people to deal unethically with others. It is important to understand that your hard work offers value and oftentimes that value is not just monetary. Link buying and selling still happens a lot and there are market prices according to an ahref study. So we aren’t saying to turn up your nose at an amazing offer, just that you should always exercise caution and consider the true and long term costs and benefits of any partnerships.