SEO: Why Buying Links is a Bad Idea

Back in the day, buying links was one of the most winning (albeit expensive) strategies for link building. You invested money directly into purchasing the links you wanted and in return you got a boost in your rank. Good times. This was caused by the fact that in the early days things were too simple and algorithms were easily fooled by keyword stuffing and other black hat tactics. Google tried to mitigate this by not simply “listening to what the page has to say about itself, but also listening to what other pages have to say about it” (so to speak). This was a colossal failure. It worked out well enough in the beginning, until people realized that the principle behind keyword stuffing could be implemented here, though in a bit of a different form. At the end of the day, it was all the same – tactics that fooled the algorithms and boosted the SEO results of bad sites way beyond what they naturally could achieve. Things escalated even more when SEOs started using automated software to generate links. This was unacceptable to Google and it took them a few years, but they managed to penalize people resorting to both tactics.

Enter the Panda and Penguin updates. Panda had to ensure that content was free of keyword stuffing and other such tactics, whereas Penguin handled the links.  If you had purchased or automated links, you would be severely penalized. Some people don’t seem to have gotten the memo, because they continue buying links and in fact, these businesses are still thriving, which shouldn’t generally be happening. And yet it is. So if you’re wondering why you got penalized after spending a lot of money on links, now you know.

NXTFactor doesn’t use black hat tactics. We get excellent results via the traditional, Google-approved methods, so you can always count on us.