Should you buy links to your website?

You probably already know that links are one of the most powerful ways to get your site ranked for your keywords.

Other people know this, too, and so many websites have popped up that are selling links, either links from their own site(s) or links from other sites.

So the question comes up, should you buy links from other sites to rank well in the search engines? Now, I'm not going to tell you Yes or No, but I am going to give you the pros and cons of link buying.

Benefits of Buying Links

The benefits of buying links are pretty obvious: you can instantly have a huge volume of links pointing to your website. This will help you rank immediately in MSN, but not in Yahoo or Google. I'll explain why in the next part of the article.

With some of the link buying services you get to pick and choose what sites your links appear on, and which pages they appear on. Personally I would recommend not using a service that does NOT let you do this.

If a service does not let you pick which websites your link appears on, then it is likely that they are just running a link farm and in the end they will get banned and you will lose your rankings.

The other obvious advantage of buying liks is that it saves you a huge amount of time. Rather than having to go through the process of exchanging links (even if you use a fantastic piece of software like SEO Elite that makes this easy), you can use all of that time to focus on building good content on your sites.

Another thing that buying links can do is to get your site crawled, not ranked. If you purchase a PR7 or PR8 link to your site Google will usually come running to crawl your site. Once your site has been crawled, you can cancel the bought link. So it's a short term investment to get your site crawled.

So the benefits of link buying are that it makes aquiring links fast and easy, you get to pick which sites your links appear on, and it can get your site crawled quickly.

The Down Side of Buying Links

There are, however, down sides to buying links for the purpose of ranking well. The number one down side is expense.

If you buy 250 QUALITY links (meaning that the site is a well ranked site and the page has good page rank and your link is in a good position on the page), you'll pay at least $500-$1,000 A MONTH for those links.

Now, if you're selling car insurance and those links can get you ranked for the keywords you want and you make $3,000 a month because of it--hey, the math is good. But if you're selling children's clothing or some other item where the margins are small and the purchase price generally low, it probably is not worth laying out that kind of cash on a monthly basis.

Another down side is that the search engines do not like the practice of buying links. In fact, they consider it "gaming" their system. So once they find out a site is selling links, that site will usually get banned. That means all of those links that you bought will disappear, and you will lose your ranking.

This may not seem so bad. After all, you can just go buy some more links if that happens, right? Well yes, you can, but with the engines these days it takes quite a while before the links are found and applied to your site's ranking.

MSN is pretty darn fast about applying links to your site, but Yahoo and ESPECIALLY Google are very slow about it. Google actually "sandboxes" links if too many links are discovered too quickly. What that means is Google will wait anywhere from 6 months to a year before applying the link values to your site.

That means that you will have to wait another six months to a year before your second wave of purchased links are applied, and in the mean time your ranking will drop.

Another question to ask yourself is this: if the engines don't like the sites that sell links, will they take action against sites they find out are buying them? No solid answers on that one from the SEO community yet, but it's a question worth asking.

Summing it all Up

So to sum it up, buying links can get you a huge quantity of links quickly and easily, but it is very expensive and there are risks involved. Compare that to building links naturally, where the links will stay put for a long time to come and are in no danger of being discounted by the search engines. But it's a much longer, more tedious process.

So you decide.

Have I ever purchased links for my sites? Yes. Is it a regular practice of mine? No.

But your goals and my goals may be different.

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