Never Buy Backlinks

The Old Days

So back in the day, like about 20 years ago, the way you got your website indexed was to submit it to a directory website like Yahoo. There were lots of them.

Yahoo is one of the few that have survived. There were plenty of others. They were big at the time. They've all disappeared.

It was like a bricks and mortar business submitting its details to the Yellow Pages, An exact online analogy.

New Kid on the Block

Then along came Google.

A totally new paradigm.

In two major respects. And although it's evolved through many changes, both of these remain.

1. You don't have to submit your website. Googlebot continually crawls the web and will, sooner or later, find your website and index it. You can use GSC (Google Search Console) to speed up this process but whether you do or not, it will happen.

2. This was the real paradigm shift. Google ranked sites according to how "popular" they were. Where "popularity" was gauged according to how many backlinks they had. The more other sites were linked to them, the more authority they had, right?

Along Came the Scammers

It didn't take long to game the system.

But it still remains an important factor. Google has recently stated that the two most important factors for Google ranking are Content and Backlinks.

So naturally there are services offering backlinks, the easier of the two.

Don't fall for them!

This is how they work.

Cheap Backlinks

They register a heap of domain names, You can get a starter domain name for as little as $1.99 so it's no big expense. They get them hosted for next to nothing too,

Then they create one decent blog post (probably pay someone from Fiverr to do it for $5) and then spin it.

If you don't know what spinning is, it's software that takes an article and by substituting synonyms and rearranging the text, produces a new article that passes the duplicate content test. Some software claims that it can produce 1,000 unique articles from one.

Spinning Crap

But here's the problem. Each one of these articles reads like crap. They add literally no value.

So what a service offering backlinks does is post this spun article to all of these otherwise empty websites and then backlink to yours. If they are linking to many other websites, they can even get a temporary reasonable ranking.

It can even work for a while. You can get a spike in traffic, and think it was a good investment.

BUT...

The fact is Google absolutely hates this. It's gaming everything Google stands for.

And it will eventually discover it. Either through manual intervention or simply by Googlebot getting better at recognizing this situation.

Don't Buy Backlinks

BOTTOM LINE

Don't do it. Once you're discovered, Google will kill your website and no matter what you try, you will never rank again.