In today's digital age, a business's online presence is critical to its long-term success. One strategy that is often used to increase online visibility is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Within SEO, there is a practice known as selling backlinks and using SEO services. This article will discuss more about buying and selling backlinks, SEO services, and their benefits and risks.
Backlinks are one of the SEO strategies used to increase website rankings in search engines such as Google. National Media Backlinks are links that come from national news media websites that have a high reputation, such as Detik, CNN, Ranker and others. These backlinks are considered quality because they come from sites with high domain authority (DA), large traffic volumes, and high trust in the eyes of Google and internet users. However, are backlinks from national media always profitable?
What are Google penalties?
Google penalty is a punishment given by Google to a website that is considered to violate Google's webmaster guidelines or spam policies. This penalty can cause a decrease in the ranking of a website in search results, or even the removal of the site from Google's index.
Google actually prohibits this backlink buying and selling process. They say that buying backlinks is the same as paying someone to give a good review. This can reduce the value of the recommendation given, where someone does not give their recommendation from the heart, but because of money.
Which means that Google highly recommends that you focus first on producing a website with quality content. Having a big name so that it is widely used as a reference by other websites.
This method may be very effective for those of you who have large funds for advertising. Promote your website on various social media platforms and carry out a brand mention strategy, either with text or verbally.
But what about those who don't? Of course it takes a long time for the website to become the best reference for other websites. Moreover, the competition for keywords with high search volumes has been dominated by those from large media company websites. New business people practically only get keywords with small search volumes.
Google seems to be well aware of this. They have softened a little with the backlink buying and selling scheme. Proven in 2019, they launched a new value for the rel attribute, namely sponsored and ugc.
John Mueller from Google suggests using more backlinks with the attribute values NoFollow, Sponsored, and UGC. This softening occurs because webmasters are getting smarter in the link building process. They can easily avoid links with spam categories, link building content is made relevant, and there are also good business associations in it.
"Then, what happens if I still want to buy backlinks with the backlink value being DoFollow?".
First, what you have to prepare is to understand the risks involved. Are the backlinks obtained from low-quality content? Then most likely the backlinks will end up as toxic backlinks.
Potential Risks of Backlink SEO
Backlinks can be a risk to SEO if they come from low-quality or irrelevant sources. Harmful backlinks such as backlinks from Private Blog Networks (PBNs) or backlinks obtained through manipulative means can lower a website's ranking in search engines and result in penalties. In addition, buying backlinks is also a risky strategy that can result in penalties from Google.
Buying backlinks for SEO is very risky and can hurt your site’s rankings. Google and other search engines view purchased backlinks as link schemes, which are manipulative attempts to boost rankings. Buying backlinks can result in penalties, ranking drops, and even removal of your site from search results. Here are some reasons why buying backlinks is bad for SEO:
1. Google Penalties
Google strictly forbids buying backlinks and considers it a violation of its webmaster guidelines. If caught, your site can be penalized, including ranking drops or even removal from search results.
2. Toxic Backlinks
Purchased backlinks often come from low-quality or spammy sites, which are referred to as toxic backlinks. These backlinks hurt SEO rankings because search engines consider them to be manipulative or spammy.
3. Reputation Loss
Buying backlinks can damage your site’s reputation, as it suggests that you are doing something dishonest to boost rankings.
4. Lack of Trust
Google and users will have less trust in sites that use artificial or purchased backlinks, because they don’t see them as authoritative sources. Buying backlinks may seem like a quick way to improve SEO, but the effects are temporary and not sustainable. Purchased backlinks do not have the authority value that organically acquired backlinks do.
5. Unsafe and Unnatural
Buying backlinks is considered a “black hat SEO” technique and is unsafe. Purchased backlinks are unnatural and can cause problems in the future.
Toxic Backlinks
There are many techniques that you can do for this link building. Starting from commenting (blogwalking), doing guest posting, posting sponsored content, sharing on social media, being active in forums and others. But, whatever you do, it actually requires you to install backlinks.
Yes, backlinks are an important point that must be obtained from all types of activities above. There are 2 types of backlinks.
The first is a backlink with a DoFollow value and the second is a Backlink with a NoFollow value. The difference between the two is that DoFollow backlinks can include linked content in an important process, namely indexing. While NoFollow does not.
Here you might think that getting DoFollow Backlinks is more important. In fact, this DoFollow Backlink has a weakness, where when it is obtained from low-quality content, Google will automatically use the same assessment for the linked content.
If left unchecked, the backlinks you get will only end up with Toxic Backlinks. While NoFollow is not like that, and if it is obtained from low-quality content, it will not affect Google's assessment. But "only" affects the assessment of website visitors.
Getting NoFollow Backlinks is also relatively easy, where you can do it through various User Generated Content websites. Such as Kompasiana, Medium, Blogger, and others. Although easy, the fact is that many business people still choose to get DoFollow Backlinks.
This type of backlink is not easy to get, and sometimes requires you to pay for backlinks on certain websites. For example, you have a business in the Car Rental sector, and you pay a certain blogger website who wants to load your service content on their website. Activities like this are actually very normal and common. But is buying backlinks like this dangerous?
What is ethical link building?
The backlinks we are discussing this time are one of the supporting factors for the success of a website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This also has a huge impact on the quality of the website itself in the Google search engine. So it is possible that with these backlinks, it can improve the SEO position of a website. So this will later have a good impact on the success of your online business.
However, not all backlinks can work as we wish. Some can help your website be in the first position on Google searches, some are destructive. Therefore, we will explain in more detail how to get backlinks using quality content, so that Google can see that your website deserves to be on the first page in Google searches.,,
1. Search From Trusted Sources
Backlinks are considered quality backlinks if they come from sources that do have credibility and are trusted in Google searches. So if you find a backlink that comes from a website that may be considered spam or has a bad image such as containing bad content, then it cannot make the website in the main position or even will not appear in Google search.
When looking for the best backlinks, we recommends looking for websites that already have a good reputation and choosing websites that are already popular.
2. Create as much content as possible
One surefire way to get quality backlinks is to create or write as much content as possible. Whether it's writing content for your own website or someone else's. By contributing your content to someone else's website, in return you will get a benefit, namely a backlink that also leads to your website. And other people's sites that we entrust backlinks to will get the same reward.
3. Fixing Broken Links
If you are a website developer, of course you have made changes to the contents of the website, right? Whether it's just changing the content or even moving the content. It turns out that this can affect the backlinks in the content. Why? Because when you change or move content, the old link will be broken and cannot be accessed again.
So when visitors to your website stop by and click on the content that you have changed, the system will automatically display an error page (440 error pages) indicating that the website page no longer exists. This can annoy visitors and immediately close your website.
So that this does not happen, you can take advantage of the broken link. The method is to create a redirect link where your old content that is no longer active can be directed to your latest content. So that visitors can still access your old link because you have directed the old link to the latest link.
4. Check the Relation to Each Other
One of the most powerful ways to determine whether a backlink is quality or not is from the relationship of a link itself. What is meant is that every link that we embed in the website content is related to the target link that is embedded. An easy example is like this, you embed a link in the website content with the same topic title. For example, a topic title about hosting services, in the content of the content is embedded a link to another website with the same topic.
In other words, each backlink that is related to each other will get more clicks because the visitors who read it are people who are interested in the topic.
5. Monitoring Competitor Backlink Sources
The last point that you can do to get quality backlinks is by monitoring the backlink sources of your competitors or sales competitors who both sell and market products of the same type.
How to Get Quality Backlinks
If you still insist on doing it, then pay attention to the important points below;
- Make sure the website has good DA & PA metric values. Generally, each metric is at a value of 20-30.
- Providing backlinks to the content of the targeted website (which you want to collaborate with) before, not too much. For example, the website has created content for other business websites, and there is more than 1 link linked to it.
- Having a decent amount of organic traffic. Many keywords from the content of the website you want to collaborate with appear in Google searches (indexed).
- Relevant to your business niche.
Conclusion
A backlink is a link from one website to another. Search engines like Google use backlinks as one of the factors in determining a site’s ranking in search results. The more quality backlinks a site has, the more likely it is to appear at the top of search results.
Backlink trading is the practice where website owners purchase links from other websites in order to increase their site’s authority and ranking in search engines. While this can provide quick results, it carries a number of significant risks.
Both backlink trading and using SEO services have their own advantages and risks. Backlink trading can provide quick results but carries a high risk of being penalized by search engines. On the other hand, SEO services offer a more sustainable and safe approach, although results may take longer to show. For businesses looking to increase their online visibility, it is important to consider both approaches carefully and choose the strategy that best suits their needs and budget...
