Recently I’ve spoke to a few SEO “experts” who all claim that the text link buying days are over and it is no longer feasible to buy quality inbound links to a site you’re trying to promote in the SERP’s. Well, this is a general view of the situation and I’m happy to say they are wrong.

Google are not stupid, they have a lot of money and a lot of talented people working for them, they know about people buying links purely for link popularity and they are trying to do something about it.

Sites which have been built purely for selling text links on are easy to spot for us and for Google. Such sites are filitered and link reputation / PR is not passed on the way it would normally be from a “normal” site. The key is to do some background checking on the site you are thinking about buying some text links from. Is the site loaded with text link ads? Are the text links displayed on the site linking to irrelevant sites? Use your common sense and look for fresh sites with not too much text link advertising.

Matt Cutts has mentioned time and time again the importance of obtaining quality, relevant inbound links from related sites, getting these links is a serious factor in achieveing any sort of good rank.

Now you know that these text links still work and can perform some magic for your site go get some but don’t go overboard, implementing a link strategy needs to be a controlled process. Obtaining 25 links to your new site in the first month will do you more harm than good. Your site will be filtered as the Googlebot will detect un-natural link growth, especially if your link buying spree ends suddenly. The key is to develop a link addition frequency that looks natural.

Buying text links

Originally from Iain Davidson, search engine optimisation and tech blog by iain