With all the furore around paid inbound/backlinks recently I thought I would share my view on the matter and discuss the positives and negatives that surround the subject.

Paid links are controversial, they are essentially a money making method from something that was never meant to be exploited. By achieving inbound links you are achieving authority and pagerank for indexing and will therefore appear higher in SERPs, following the realisation of this by Search Engine Optimisers brought about the necessity for “Link suppliers”.

When the Search Engine Algorithms were essentially fathomed the importance was clear and link farming began to make money, and it is viewed as good ROI for siteowners. Seeing as the Internet is a “net” of links they are obviously held in very high esteem.

This creates obvious ethical issues and a serious problem for spidering. Google has recently stated it will be cracking down on paid links, but it’s not clear to me how they can do this without sheer manpower or a serious breakthrough in the intelligence of the Google bot. The major problem arises when sites that do not possibly hold relevant or even truthful information are ranking higher than government and other trusted sites, a more in depth example of this was recently made by Matt Cutts in his blog. This is exactly what Google wants to stamp out.

On the other side of the coin as an optimiser myself, if you can achieve highly relevant backlinks to your page, and you feel you have useful content on that page than why not utilise this powerful resource if its out of your own pocket? In an age of freedom of speech why shouldn’t your site be ‘out there’?

I think the best way to resolve this would be for Google to have dedicated team that perform random spot checks of the first 100 results for a search query, if any of these sites are dubious then action shall be taken accordingly. If you’re not doing anything wrong I can see no reason why your site should not be ranked highly.

For more information on linking strategies please feel free to contact SEO Consult.

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