What is a Paid Link?
A paid link is a backlink you receive in exchange for payment. The payment could be in the form of money or something else of an equivalent value.
Paid links violate Google Search Essential guidelines and are considered a black hat SEO technique. Google is usually on the lookout for sites that buy links and would demote their rankings or even deindex them entirely from search results pages.
That said, we should clarify that Google permits bloggers to buy links insofar as they are correctly labeled as advertisements and contain a gesponsord of nofollow link attribute. Sponsored links that are not correctly labeled will be considered paid links.
How Do Links Affect SEO
Search engines consider backlinks a vote of confidence from other sites to your site. This is based on the premise that bloggers only link to content they find valuable, trustworthy, and authoritative.
So, when a site links to your site, it means it found your content high-quality and authoritative enough to be linked to. This is good for SEO, as it prompts search engines to improve the rankings of the site receiving the link.
Backlinks positively correlate with rankings, and the more high-quality and relevant backlinks a site receives, the more likely it is to rank higher on search result pages. This has made backlinks a key driver of SEO success, and many bloggers even refer to it as the “fuel of SEO.”
However, it has also a situation wherein malicious bloggers engage in manipulative link building techniques to improve their rankings on search results pages. Paid links are one such link building technique.
How Natural Links Affect SEO
Natural links are links you earn from other sites without soliciting or requesting them. You earn these links when the blogger of the linking site finds your content and links back to it because they found it helpful.
Natural links are the most desired type of backlinks you want pointing to your site. They signal to search engines that your site is high-quality and significantly increase your chances of ranking on search results pages.
However, natural links are challenging to earn, even for an established site. So, many bloggers take the easy way out by paying for the links, which is a faster and easier way to get backlinks pointing to their site.
SEO Importance of Paid Links
Paid links are not helpful for your SEO. It is important to know that Google has multiple sophisticated systems for detecting paid links and would refuse to consider them for your rankings.
Paid links may cause Google to issue you a manual action penalty against your site. When that happens, Google would demote your rankings and may even remove your page entirely from search results pages.
Despite this, many bloggers purchase links anyway, and some pass through Google’s systems. While such links may provide SEO benefits in the short term, their long-term viability remains questionable, as Google may release an algorithm update to uncover and penalize your site in the future.
For example, in 2012, Google released the penguin algorithm update that demoted the rankings of sites that engaged in multiple black hat link building techniques. The update affected the rankings of multiple sites and kicked them off Google search results pages overnight.
Google has added penguin to its core algorithm, but there is no guarantee that it will not release a new algorithm update to detect paid links in the future. So, paid links are not a reliable method of building backlinks in the long term, and it is recommended to avoid relying on them for your SEO and ranking efforts.