Google's team of search engine techies including Matt Cutts, have all made clear Google's stance on paid links over the last couple of years. Buying and selling links to purposefully manipulate the search engines is bad, well... according to them anyways.

Their stance is understandable really, as it destroys Google's ability to use links as an algorithmic calculation. Participating in buying or selling links results in both manual penalties and ranking penalties for those proved to be involved in manipulating Google's calculations.

Understandably, many reputable businesses, sites, and individuals have dropped this method of link building and have been frantically looking for another way ever since. In this post I will outline some of paid link building techniques that are still perfectly ethical, proving that you can still buy links without being slapped!

1Charitable Contributions -  Donate to charities and receive a link in return. It's important to make sure the charities you target do have some geographical or topical relevance, otherwise the link is practically useless to you. The Charity Navigator or the BBB's Accredited Charity Directory are two great resources for finding suitable charities to approach for buying links. Make sure you look through the site to see if they do actually link out to other sites, you may be wasting your time otherwise.

2Sponsor Events - Sponsor an event (either online or off) no matter how big or small, you will receive a link from the events' website and possibly from the attendees websites also. You can either search through your local magazines or newspapers for upcoming events, or you can also check out places like craigslist.org or upcoming.org as well. It is important that you stay within your topic market or your geographical location when choosing an event to sponsor.

3Purchase Content - Look for content within your industry that is of high quality and has already achieved a great deal of link popularity, contact the webmaster and offer to buy the content from them. If they say yes, congratulations, now ask them to 301 permanent redirect all incoming traffic and link popularity to the article on your site.

4Purchase Websites - Buy a website that is on topic leaves and you're free to do with the incoming links what you please. Simply redirect all the links to your main site wherever you feel it would benefit the visitors of the old site. Now this is not an easy method of getting links, there's a lot involved, but a good resource for this is Bruce Clay's post on buying sites for SEO.

These methods have been proven to be very effective, but all link building efforts designed to alleviate rankings come with that inherent risk. These are all techniques that should be undertaken relatively discretely.

If anyone has any more ideas they would like to share other than the ones I have covered here, then please feel free to give your contribution.

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Marte Cliff  - What about reciprocal links?     |2008-12-20 14:22:20 A friend of mine just lost his page 1 ranking - disappeared completely from search - and he thinks it's because he got paid links from a "bad neighborhood." He says the only route to page one is through paid links, but you have to be careful. He also mentioned that google disregards reciprocal links. What's your experience with that? Reply | Quote 0   0

Wes     |2008-12-21 13:44:12 Hi Marte, Participating in so called bad neighborhoods is something that can contribute to being penalized in Google, but this has to be done to an extreme. I mean, a few links here and there from link farms and spammy sites is completely out of your control, and Google knows this. It's only when a pattern begins to emerge, that drastic actions are taken. Paid links are becoming easier to spot everyday, hence the reason for this post. Your friend is right, it is risky Also, your point on reciprocal linking, these are still counted by Google. Although they have become less important in Google's algorithm, they still are valuable and should be used as a small part of a varied linking strategy. Also, all the links you attain should be from relevant and trusted sources. It's no good linking from a site or page on golf, if you're site is about swimming pools for instance. Hope that helps, Wes Reply | Quote 0   0

Marte Cliff  - Thank you!     |2008-12-21 13:49:21 Thanks for clearing that up. I often add links in my samples page to web pages I've written for clients - and sometimes they reciprocate. Didn't want to be messing things up! Reply | Quote 0   0

Animation Outsourcing  - Animation Outsourcing     |2009-07-12 00:52:38 I visit your blog frequently and its very good , I am not a expert webmaster but i like your blog as its very simple and understandable.. please keep it up , 10/10 marks... Reply | Quote 0   0

Tylor     |2009-07-31 19:02:06 I agree with some points here. i think this is some late reading..but, ey i liked the post Thanks for the post. Reply | Quote 0   0

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