There are many things we could do to gain links and not all of them can be gained easily for free. Many people actually need to purchase links to boost their SEO performance. In general, this is not an appropriate SEO practice, but we should still be somewhat open minded about it. It is true that many paid links originate from shady sources. This includes the use of proxies and bots. However, there are also reputable websites that sell links in different forms. These links are actually sold as preferential treatment and advertising. This should allow us to get multiple dofollow links from reputable websites. However, we should know that many paid links from legitimate sources are not permanent and we may need to subscribe to make sure that our links stay there.
We should know that Google has sophisticated methods to find spammy and bad links. Many people buy spammy links in bulks thinking that automated methods that they use won’t be discovered by Google. Actually, they could gain very little from such unethical practices. Although Google and other major search engine services are not Internet polices, they also need to make sure that their search results are legitimate. If these search engines find that we purchase bulk links, it is possible that our website will be removed temporarily or even permanently from index. Google also regularly performs major algorithm update to make their results more relevant. When this happens, websites that thrive upon bad, spammy links could find drastic drop in their ranking and traffic.
We are often warned that it is not acceptable to place multiple outbound links in our webpage. This has caused people to add only smaller number of outbound links. They fear that Google mistakenly sees them as link farms that sell links to external parties. It is true that link farms would be penalized and their links will be considered useless. In this case, it is possible that all URL listed in link farms will be discovered and their ranks will be hit. Google and major search engines consider it as acceptable if we have many outbound links in one of the webpages, but we should make sure that we do this for good purposes. As an example, we may want to inform readers about websites that have relevant and interesting information.
In general, we shouldn’t manipulate search rankings by using links improperly. There are many ways that are reportedly can be used to manipulate search rankings, but we should make sure that they don’t violate standard SEO regulations. The real purpose of SEO is to make our website ranks better in results. It is a form of marketing and we should do this legitimately. There’s no magical way to fool search engine algorithm and if there are, they could be loopholes that haven’t been addressed. Once such a technique becomes widespread, we could expect that Google will immediately apply an update to its algorithm.
