I’ve heard some pretty horrendous stories regarding cheaply purchased bundles of backlinks from sites like Fiverr.

You know, the ones where dastardly google moderators discover them and penalise you, resulting in a considerable drop in rankings over the next 6 months – until you are welcomed back with open arms, lesson HOPEFULLY learnt.

But in the next breath, I am also aware of major brands that have admitted that backlinks have increased their domain authority considerably and thus their traffic and leads have also increased.

So what ARE the risks? The good and the bad?

The Bad

The above drop in traffic – 70% to be in fact – happened after an inquisitive founder decided to give his website a little bit of a boost.

After all, we all know how time-consuming it can be to build backlinks. Approaching endless websites in your niche in the hope that ONE of them will see you as a golden egg and give you the prestigious position of ‘guest blogger’

Unfortunately for him, the PR backlinks were low quality and produced absolutely NO activity. Not to mention they had been passed around to thousands of other consumers, thus being picked up by google moderators.

Even though the unfortunate guy was STILL creating 2-3 blog posts a week, his site took a massive hit and it took him MONTHS to recover.

The Good

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

If you want to take the risk and breach googles guidelines – this isn’t a guilt trip, I’ve also thought about it – then here are a few guidelines to abide by.

• Avoid package deals and instead, pay for links individually

• Purchase DIRECTLY from the site owners and NOT 3rd parties.

• Avoid purchasing from sites that openly advertise them

• Buy links from sites that are relevant to your own topic

• Buy individual page links, not links to cover your WHOLE website

• Use the 10% rule, purchase only 10% of the total links your site has

So to buy or not to buy? personally, I think it’s only a matter of time before you are found out. After all, it’s highly likely the links you purchased -even good quality ones –  are still going to be making the rounds in the coming months.

So what CAN you do?

Simple, invest in creating good quality content that people will WANT to link too. Once you have enough posts on your niche,you can then start to approach sites with a similar content to yours and see if they will accept guest posts.

Yes, it IS more time consuming, but is it worth the risk of having your keywords BLOCKED for up to 6 months and taking a massive hit in rankings?

So look into OUTSOURCING for content creation.

After all, the figures below speak for themselves!