Is Link Buying Immoral?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 14 of October , 2008 at 10:22 pm

WebPro News has an interesting article on link buying. Evidently, Danny Sullivan, a well known SEO guru, was approached by a link seller then reported that link seller to Google. Poor link seller.

Actually, I have no sympathy for the link seller at all. Clearly, Danny Sullivan knew what he was doing. And he was right. But there is a correct way to go about link buying that won’t hurt you. It’s not all bad.

First, never buy a link from a company that claims that link buying is acceptable in Google’s eyes unless one of the two following conditions are met:

• The link uses the rel=”nofollow” attribute
• It is redirected to an intermediate page blocking search engines with a robots.txt file

Those are the conditions under which Google will accept link buying as ethical activity. The reason is because those types of links don’t affect search results. Other types of links do. Google, for what should be obvious reasons, doesn’t want people using monied interests to affect organic search results. Quite frankly, ethical search engine optimization experts won’t either.

If you are going to buy links then at least take the time to find out how to do it without killing your own site’s reputation. Otherwise, you’ll regret it.

                      Category: Inbound Links, Link Selling                      

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