Paid Links: Problem Or Panacea?

[Diego]

Are paid links necessary?

If you read the blogs of people John Chow and ProBlogger you’d think you couldn’t run a website without selling links or buying them. Is it true?

Personally, I’d say that’s not true. Paid links may have some value, but there are so many ways to get free links and it’s so easy to do that I wouldn’t even think about buying links without first using the free methods of link building at my disposal. But what about selling links?

When it comes to selling links on your website to others who want to buy them, there are a few things to keep in mind. No. 1, is the link buyer a spammer? If so, you want think long and hard before you sell links.

Who you link to says a lot about the type of website you run. It’s your reputation and you want to guard it viciously. Not just against the search engines either. You human visitors want to be able to trust you and they are far more important than the search engines. Spiders can deliver you traffic, but if your traffic doesn’t trust you because you will sell links to anyone for any reason then it won’t matter how much traffic you get.

That’s why paid links are such a problem. Yes, you can good money on the short term. But how will it fair long term? If you can’t translate those short term benefits into something permanent, you’d be better off leaving the paid links to someone else when it comes to your search engine optimziation.

Nick Stamoulis