Should I Buy One Way Links to My Web Site?

I frequently see the question asked, "Is it ok to buy one way links?" The answer is No! Never! Noda! I am not sure I made myself clear. Simply do not do it. There are some exceptions to this rule, which I will explain below. Everyone I have ever known to be banned from Google fell into the temptation to purchase one way links. With search engine positioning so competitive the temptation to buy one way links is great.

I understand the temptation to buy one way links or to buy links in general. You have built a great web site. You have quality content. You have worked to do things you need to do to get a good web position. But none of your pages show up in the top 50 for the key words on their page. You check the back links of those in front of you and see that they have two or three times the links you have. So you do a search on how to get links to your site. Then you see the ads. For $50 will provide you with 50 one way links to your site all on high PR sites or 500 links for $100. You go to their page and they make it sound so tempting. In a moment of weakness you decide to do it. You need an edge over your competition. The next thing you know the number of hits to your site are up. Your page rank is up. You are so happy. Then a month or two later the traffic to your site suddenly stops. You do a search for all you key words the do not show up in the first two hundred results. You go to your page and your page rank on your Google tool bar has turned gray. You type your URL into Google and you cannot even find your page that way. Google has banned you and there is nothing you can do about it.

The problem is that most if not all of these programs are link farms. Google, Yahoo and MSN tell you on their web sites not to participate in these types of programs. They call this link Spamming and they take it very seriously. If they find you participating in one they do not try to contact you and warn you. They just ban your site. Yahoo and MSN may just restrict your site or not count the links but Google will usually ban you. While Google has several things listed that can get you banned from their site, everyone that I have every known to be banned by Google had been banned for this reason.

I have had dozens of friends and online acquaintances that have had this very thing happen to them. They were warned about buying one way links. They saw the advertisement for hundreds or thousands of links and could not resist the temptation. The result was always the same.

So does that mean you should never buy a link to your page? The answer is no. There are legitimate ways to pay for links to your site. Some of them are.

- Paying someone to put an article you wrote into their newsletter.
- Buying add space on a site.
- Paying for a press release.

I cover these in detail in my article "How to get one way links to your web site".

There are individual sites that offer to sell or lease link space to you. To improve your page rank you need many links. This becomes unaffordable to do through buying links. There are pages that have a page rank of 7 or 8 that make this offer. One link from a page 7 or 8 could help your site in it positioning. But they usually ask a lot of money for the link. In my opinion the price out ways the benefit.