The truth about paid links

by Patrick Altoft on August 23, 2007 / 4 responses

Rand has a good summary of a SES session this week covering paid
links. Matt Cutts was discussing the issues from a Google point of
view stating that any paid links that were designed to pass PageRank
were a bad thing. He also stated that nofollow, 302 redirects,
redirects that pass through a script blocked by robots.txt were all
valid ways of making paid links OK.

The problem with paid links is that they work. Not only that but they
work very well. Thousands of large corporations have bought their way
to the top of some very competitive niches using paid links and Google
doesn’t appear to be doing much about it. Ask Matt Cutts and he will
say that most of the paid links have been devalued and are not helping
the sites position but that doesn’t make any difference. Throw enough
money at paid links and some of them are bound to work.

Until Google figures out a way to stop 100% of paid links working then
there is still a place for them in search engine marketing.

Paid Links Work

Last year a client in a very competitive niche wanted his brand new
site to rank number 1 across all his keywords. The niche was the kind
that any self respecting webmaster would never link their site to for
fear of being in a bad neighbourhood so linkbaiting was not an option.

The method we used was to buy a LOT of links from any site that would take us. Poker sites, adult sites, sitewide links at directories, forum signatures. Every type of link that is blatantly a paid link.

We didn’t get one natural link in 12 months and spent a 5 figure sum on paid links.
Sure enough after 12 months the site went to number 1 and is still there today.

If you play with paid links you might get burned. On the other hand you might make 10k per week from organic rankings.

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.