SEO

Major Pros and Site-Breaking Cons of Buying Backlinks in 2024

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By Tomislav

5 Major Pros of Buying Backlinks

Buying backlinks is a link building strategy as old as dirt.

And if done correctly, it works. There’s no denying that fact.

Here are the major benefits of buying your way to the top of the SERPs with backlinks.

High-Quality Backlinks Move the Needle

Backlinks are one of the key factors Google considers when ranking pages and websites in the SERPs.

They are votes of confidence for your content from outside sources.

The more authoritative the source, the more significant the vote.

In essence, high-quality backlinks are first Dofollow links from authoritative, niche, or industry-relevant referring domains.

These links have the power to significantly impact your rankings and authority.

Such backlinks are often elusive, but money can open doors that would otherwise remain closed to your website.

However, beware, high-quality backlinks are not cheap.

Sometimes Time is More Important than Money

If you’re running a successful business and have cash flows to support your marketing budget, the time saved by buying backlinks often outweighs the expense.

By purchasing backlinks, you can achieve better results and earn more money faster.

Especially in cases where your goal is ranking within a certain low-to-mid population geographical area, the number of backlinks needed to start ranking is relatively small.

Thus, purchasing backlinks can be a wise financial decision.

Targeted Nature of Choosing Your Backlinks

When purchasing backlinks, the referring domain usually allows you to select the anchor text and the specific page you wish to link to, granting you full control over which pages you intend to enhance.

While it’s generally advisable to build branded anchor text backlinks to your homepage to uplift your entire website, there are instances where, with the right strategy, you can directly improve the ranking of your ‘money pages.’

Increased Organic Traffic and Benefits it Brings

Provided your content aligns with your enhanced backlink profile, your pages will gradually ascend to the top of the SERPs, securing increasing amounts of organic traffic.

The effectiveness of your website in converting this traffic into leads and sales depends on you, but even sites that aren’t optimally configured will experience the advantages of increased visibility.

Attain Escape Velocity Quicker

Though escape velocity is a term borrowed from rocket science, it’s highly relevant to SEO.

In rocketry, escape velocity is the speed needed to break free from a planet’s gravitational pull.

In SEO, accelerating your backlink acquisition beyond the organic rate can propel your content to the SERP summit quickly, which, in turn, attracts more backlinks as your content is now seen as authoritative.

This marks a significant shift from when your content, though equally good, remained unnoticed because people tend to focus on the first few Google results.

7 Site-Breaking Cons of Buying Backlinks

You might be excited by the benefits of buying backlinks, but before you do, make sure you’re aware of the potential pitfalls as well.

Here are 7 cons of buying backlinks that can cost you everything.

This Practice is Against Google’s Guidelines

Buying backlinks is fundamentally against Google’s guidelines.

It doesn’t matter that “everyone’s doing it” or “no one’s getting punished that I know of” – Google does not want you to build backlinks.

It messes with their ability to rank the best pages on any given query, making their service worse and their job more difficult.

Who cares, right? Well, you might if it gets you in trouble.

Perpetual Risk of Algorithmic and Manual Action Penalties

Once you start building backlinks in large quantities, you’ll never be completely safe.

Most backlinks Google crawlers stumble upon get indexed and filed.

You might get away with building backlinks for months, or even years, but then Google might discover your footprints, or your link seller’s footprints, and blow their entire operation up with algorithmic and manual action penalties.

If you’re lucky, Google will only ignore the backlinks you built, and while losing the benefits, you’ll still survive.

But in some cases, your domain will get algorithmically penalized or, even worse, manually penalized by an actual Google employee.

From that point, it’s an uphill battle to restore any semblance of rankings you used to have.

High Quality Backlinks are Expensive

Depending on the competition, you might need a lot of high-quality backlinks to build up your backlink profile enough to challenge the big dogs.

High-quality backlinks can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and you might end up spending anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars on backlinks if your competition is steep.

Unskilled Backlink Sellers

There are so many traps one can fall into when building backlinks for a website.

Here are just a few ways unskilled backlink builders can waste your money and jeopardize your business:

  • Not knowing what types of backlinks your specific backlink profile needs
  • Building low-quality backlinks that don’t move the needle
  • Building too many of the same exact type of backlinks
  • Choosing the wrong anchor text
  • Building backlinks to the wrong page or pages on your website

No Guarantee of Success

You might spend a lot of money on backlinks and see no meaningful results.

Say, your site ranks in the lower half of the first page for your ‘money keywords’ and you’re buying backlinks to get into the top 3.

Your competition might just be outspending you and getting backlinks at a quicker pace, rendering your efforts fruitless at the end of the day.

To be fair, if you build links of reasonable quality at a reasonable pace, odds are this won’t happen to you, but it’s always a possibility, so keep that in mind and track and analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles.

Unscrupulous Link Building Service Sellers

Some backlink building service sellers are downright scammers and will take your money and get you backlinks from domains with artificially boosted domain rating (DR).

So you’ll think you got a backlink from a DR 80 site, which would be a cause for celebration, meanwhile, you got a very toxic link that’s actually hurting your domain.

Another real possibility is you thinking the seller delivered a bunch of reasonably decent backlinks, meanwhile, you got backlinks from PBNs and link farms.

Such links very rarely do any good for your domain. In fact, more often than not, they do harm.

Difficulty in Measuring ROI

You might be caught up in an endless loop of buying backlinks and, while at first you could see the benefits, after a while you’re not really sure how beneficial the next set of delivered backlinks from the seller really will be, even if they’re legit links.

At some point, unless your niche is super-competitive, you can afford to let the foot off the gas and let your quality content continue doing the heavy lifting going forward, but you won’t be able to recognize that moment in time and continue spending money unnecessarily.