| What are paid backlinks? Incoming links, to your site, are what all of the search engines use as a criteria to define whether your website is worth listing high in their results or not. So, in very basic terms, if you have a lot of backlinks, you will be ranked highly with the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc).
A backlink is just a link from another website or web page to your website or your page. The reason that the search engines use this as a measuring tool is because they "feel" that if your site is worth being linked to by another site, then your site must be worthwhile. There is a lot more that could be said about that but again, in a nutshell, it all comes down to this: the more websites that you have linking to your website, and the better quality the links (meaning, the more relevant the links are to your website), the higher you will rank in the search engines.
But building links yourself is a tedious, long and continuous process. So, not too long ago, people were very comfortable with paying a service to provide them with a backlink. But it didn't take Google too long to figure out that this was happening and paid linking services started being penalized.
So now the rules are different. Google does allow you to buy links but they will put your links through the ringer to make sure you follow their guidelines. What this means for you is that you've got to buy links from sites that do adhere to Google's constantly changing guidelines. If you are buying backlinks just for traffic, you will be able to follow the google guidelines. But if you are buying them to increase the SEO of your sight, then you should probably hold on to your money since the search engines only allow no-follow links.
However, while paid backlinks may not be the way to go, there are a number of incoming link services that you can choose to use rather than just outright buying backlinks. These services will actually do the link-building work for you rather than just selling you the links. Different services offer different features so just make sure that you do the proper amount of research to establish those that are really working the right way and keeping one step ahead of the search engine rules and regulations.
While backlink services will not be cheap, they offer a great alternative to you spending an enormous amount of time trying to learn about backlink-building and then applying it to your business. Choosing the right service allows you to let the experts handle that aspect so that you can go on to other business building activities. There are several link-building services to choose from and the list will probably continue to grow as long as it is common knowledge that backlinks are necessary for high search engine ranking. |