Is there danger in buying links for organic search enging positioning? Does a PPC Ad count as a paid link? Can your website be banned for buying links? Learn the answers to these questions and more!
SEO Has Always Been a Game at Beating "the Algorithm": I remember working at a large SEO Agency for 5 years and working feverishly to get client's websites ranked in Google. Over the course of those years we saw SEVERAL "algorithm" changes on Google's end that really shook up the rankings on our client's sites. When you think about it - when Google makes a change and websites suddenly lose their positioning, that could literally be tagged as "sudden death" to most businesses. That's just one reason I'm a huge supporter of PPC Advertising.
Why Does Google Change Things Up Anyway?: Always remember this - Google is all about user experience. When people log on to Google.com and start in with their keyword searches, Google wants to provide that user with the best results - both organic and paid search so the user will come back again and again. So when a website owner finds a way to get ranked above his competition (other than longevity, good coding in the source code, a lot of relevant content and legitimate links) then it literally becomes Google's job to play internet police and penalize that site. Think of if this way ... when Google makes changes to their organic algorithm it's usually a measure taken to remove the spammers from the SERP's. Remember the days of keyword stuffing meta tags or putting hidden text in the body of a webpage that was a massive repetition of a handful of keywords? Aren't you glad that those "POS" sites are gone? I am!
The Latest Craze in SEO - Buying Links: While effective (at least it is now) Google is getting ready to shake things up again. If you've employed a service to blast a bunch of text links out to their paid bloggers, you may want to rethink that strategy. According to Google's Webmaster - the day is rapidly approaching when those links won't do you much good. Google's Webmaster makes it known what you should do when your site is first launched. Read it here - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769. They say (and I quote) " ... have other RELEVANT sites link to yours." The reason these blog links are getting so much scrutiny from Google is because most blogs being used for links aren't relevant to the site they're linking to. Yes, these bloggers are instructed to write a few paragraphs of "relevant" content around these text links, but that hardly classifies the entire blog as "relevant". (Just another spam method if you ask me).
In Summary: If you're really relying on this latest method of optimizing your site (which it really isn't optimizing your site at all), I should say relying on buying text links in blogs for better rankings, you may want to reconsider your strategy as those dollars may go bye bye before long. Solid PPC Management will always provide ROI to help continue your company's growth! Don't worry ... PPC Ads are not considered "paid links". They are - and always will be - paid advertisements that don't carry link value for SEO. While your site won't be banned from Google for buying text links, your rankings could suddenly plummet when Google discovers your links are bought.
