Buying links is a quick way to increase your rankings. However, it can be risky. It is important to be sure you are getting quality links. If you buy low-quality links, you won’t get your website to rank. You can also be penalized by Google for using this method.

In addition to Google, other search engines such as Ask, MSN, and Yahoo also have policies against the practice of buying links. Although they don’t explicitly prohibit the practice, they do discourage it.

Some of the early examples of backlink buying include paid directory submissions. These were always sold in order to gain higher Google rankings. This was considered a black hat technique at the time. In the mid-2000s, the paid link industry was booming. Hundreds of companies developed services to help businesses obtain links.

The Risks of Buying Links

Another technique was paid guest posts. This is where the owner of a blog writes a post and pays for it to be posted on another site. If the site owner doesn’t approve the post, the link doesn’t get built.

Other forms of buying links are private blog networks and niche edits. These are ways of acquiring links on established web pages. The costs can be high, but they can be beneficial to your SEO campaign.

One of the most common techniques is the “follow” link. This is a normal h-ref link without any user-generated content attributes or sponsored attributes. The benefit of this type of link is that it passes PageRank credit to the linked-to page.