Buying and Selling Links Debate

At Search Marketing Gurus blog, Li Evans has a great collection of opinions on paid links from both the search marketer and publisher’s perspective. She asked several people that work in the search marketing industry these questions:

• What is your opinion of buying links for clients?
• What is your opinion of sites that sell links but do not indicate they are paid?

Responses come from Greg Meyers, Andy Beal, Chris Sherman, Christine Churchill, Frank Watson, Anne Kennedy, Bill Slawski, Debra Mastaler and a little something from Cameron Olthius.

Responses to the “opinion of buying links for clients” question range from, “it’s ok as long as you do your research and there’s full disclosure” to, “no way not ever”. There’s also quite a bit of play with the semantics of what constitutes “paid”. If you pay an employee to negotiate links to a client site (with or without payment to the link source) that’s a paid link isn’t it? If you barter something for a link, that’s a form of compensation isn’t it? When you go down that road it gets both interesting and distracting from the real issue

I really like Anne Kennedy’s comment, “Chase customers, not algorithms.” Those four words speak volumes about her strategic and long term perspective of doing search marketing. Not chasing algorithms is not to say don’t understand what they are and how they work, it simply means focus on a sustainable end result.

If you’re in the game for the long haul, you have to plan on being amazingly successful. Being too dependent on variables you’ll never have control over (like algorithms or search engines’ policies) creates the kind of business-destroying risk, should the tide turn the other way, that no one wants to happen.

To me, buying text links from other sites is an advertising tactic. If a web site would benefit from high profile exposure on a relevant web site, why not buy that text link ad? It’s the search engine’s responsibility to be smart enough to discount that link as a ranking signal. Buying text links is indeed a way to buy an advantage, but if you can gain that advantage in more sustainable ways, why not?