What Are Paid Links?
Paid links are the links that are obtained in exchange for money when a website owner makes an agreement with another party to provide links and gets paid for this.
The aim is to increase traffic to the website where the hyperlinks are included and improve its search engine rankings.
This practice is discouraged because high-quality and informative content is the only effective, appropriate, and legitimate way to attract links naturally from other sites.
History of paid links
Paid links are not new but are a very old way to attract traffic to a website and manipulate rankings.
In the past, when search engines were not as sophisticated as they are, a website's authority and relevance were proportional to the number of inbound links to that website.
This gave the website owners a way to accumulate low-quality links through buying using different techniques including link farms and spammy directories. This false practice was called "link buying" or "paid linking".
As time went by, the search engines improved their efficiency and began detecting paid links and other such techniques that violate their guidelines.
In 2005, Google introduced the "nofollow" attribute for website owners to signal the search engine that a link is just a vote of confidence from the website it comes from.
As soon as the search engines started penalising the websites for paid links, website owners started leaving this practice and adopting natural ways to earn organic traffic through high-quality content.
Nowadays, this technique is considered a black hat SEO tactic and is not encouraged for use as a way to improve ranking.
Paid links vs advertisements
Paid link building and online advertising might share the same concept at some point but they are quite different approaches.
The paid links aim to manipulate search engines to get a lot of traffic by buying more backlinks, while online advertising is legitimate and aims to increase sales and raise brand awareness.
Matt Cutts tells them apart in a video.
Google takes paid linking and online advertisements differently and recommends the use of a “rel=sponsored” tag for the outbound links that are sponsored and not editorial links.
This makes it easy to differentiate the paid links from non-paid ones and ensures more transparency in your SEO strategy.
The "nofollow" attribute was used for signalling about sponsored or paid links, however, Google now suggests using the "sponsored" attribute as a preferred way to indicate such links.
Google’s link spam policies to check this practice
In 2022 Google released the Google Link Spam Update, also known as the Link Spam Update as a major algorithm update.
This release was aimed at identifying and penalising websites that use spammy tactics such as paid links, comment spam, etc.
The update was crucial because it involved the latest techniques for detecting spammy practices including link manipulation.
This way, the sites that used paid links as a way to gain good rankings have had their rankings dropped significantly.
According to the update, the use of any link that manipulates Google is considered a violation of its webmaster guidelines.
Can the paid links with the “nofollow” tag improve SEO?
Those webmasters who consider paid linking as a quick way to get good rankings must know that it can be counterproductive and can harm their efforts in SEO.
It is because search engines look at these links as black hat SEO techniques and not as the webmasters do.
You can get into more trouble if these links get detected and result in lower rankings or deindexation. It can also reduce visibility and traffic while harming your site's reputation.
Using paid links with a "nofollow" tag will not directly improve a website's search engine rankings.
Moreover, the use of a "nofollow" tag cannot be very helpful in boosting rankings because it tells search engines not to pass authority.
This is because the "nofollow" tag tells search engines not to pass on any authority or relevance from the linking website to the linked website.
However, paid links with a "nofollow" tag can still work for increasing visibility and attracting more traffic.
It's true because people can still be directed to click on the link and may share it to make others click on it thereby increasing traffic.
Is it a ranking factor?
Links can improve a site's ranking but you first need to understand that all inks are not the same. Google advises that the websites must be very clear while using these links to clearly identify their purpose by using the suggested attributes.
For this, Google has introduced "rel" attributes in the <a> tag of the link to show the purpose of the content they are presenting.
The "sponsored" tag shows that the link leads to some ad or paid placement and will not pass PageRank.
Likewise, "ugc" tag shows that the link leads to user-generated content and the website is not responsible for its accuracy.
The "nofollow" tag shows that the link is not authoritative and Google should not crawl this link.
These attributes are necessary for ensuring transparency in your SEO practice, however, you can still rank without using them.
This is the reason why webmasters believe that they can rank as long as they are not caught which is really discouraged since once caught, you may face the worst consequences.
How can the paid links be harmful?
They can be harmful in many ways.
They can be penalised by Google because it sees them as a way of violating its guidelines. It can result in lower rankings, loss of organic traffic, or even deindexation.
They may be low-quality and can harm your site's credibility and authority in its niche.
If search engines catch the irrelevancy or low-quality content of the linking site, the site can be considered spammy or incredible by search engines.
If the linking content has low quality, it will negatively affect traffic by increasing the bounce rate and decreasing time on the page.
How to check the penalty?
One way to know that your website is penalised for paid links is to see a noticeable drop in rankings or deindexing by the search engine.
Another way is to check the Google Search Console account where you can find manual action penalties that notify you about any violation from your side.
You can also find the details about which issues you need to address to recover from manual action penalties.
If you receive such a penalty, it is crucial to take quick action and remove any spammy links that have made you get penalised.
You can do it by contacting the website that gives you the links and requesting for their removal. Also, focusing on organic link-building can help you build a good reputation and get a good ranking over time.
Conclusion
Paid links might be good for short-term gains but are harmful due to bad consequences in the long run. This can ultimately make you have a negative impact on your SEO strategies.
Google discourages paid links and stresses showing the true nature of the links to avoid penalties in the future.
Proper use of "rel" attributes, such as "nofollow," "sponsored," and "ugc" tags, can help with staying transparent and avoid being penalised by the search engine.