Are Paid Links Good or Bad?
This blog entry was posted on September 22, 2009.
In 2005, purchasing paid text links was considered the ideal link popularity strategy to replace reciprocal linking. Today paid links are considered a risky SEO strategy and Google advises placing “no-follow” on all paid links to avoid possible penalties. But many people have great misconceptions about paid links and how to effectively use them.
In the 2005 time frame, people found that using paid text links with keywords in the anchor text could boost your site really fast in the organic search rankings.
When many webmasters began using paid links to improve their SEO results, Google began a campaign to discourage this by talking about penalizing websites who use paid links. This created a lot of fear among website owners.
But how does Google penalize websites for using paid links? Google will discount these paid links so they do not carry any weight. By removing the link popularity value, Google has made the investment in these paid links worthless for SEO purposes.
Paid links are essentially paid advertising in the same way as Google Adwords and paid banner ads are. They are effective in driving traffic to your website. The key is to not use them to artificially improve your website’s link popularity.
Effective advertising means appealing to the right audience with the right message. Advertising on closely related websites with the right message can drive targeted traffic to your website or improve your brand perception. After all, that is what you are after.
Using paid text links to build link popularity still works, but if detected by Google, the value of these links will be quickly nullified. But when used to promote product branding and as advertising to drive traffic, it is a good marketing tool. Use paid text links as a form of advertising, not for SEO reasons and you will be fine. Use them as you would PPC and banner advertising.
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Related posts:
- Deep Linking: Good or Bad?
- Link Popularity: Buying Text Links?
- Getting One Way links from your competition
- 8 Popular Link Building Myths
- Link Popularity: Part 1
Filed under: Internet Marketing
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 5:25 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
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