We used to buy links, and the pages that survived were the other ones
Bought links work until they do not, and the failure is retrospective: the rankings you lose are the ones you were paying for all along.
No, and the reason is not moral. A bought link is an asset with a landlord: it can be removed, devalued or discounted at any time, and when that happens you lose the position and keep the invoice. Links earned by something worth citing do not have that property.
What we used to do
Years ago, buying placements was ordinary practice and it worked well enough that arguing against it sounded naive. We bought them, positions improved, and clients were happy for a while.
What we did not price was that the improvement was rented. Search engines get better at recognising paid placement patterns over time, and the sites selling them get devalued in groups. When that happened, the rankings that fell were exactly the ones the money had been holding up.
The property that makes a link durable
A link is worth something because somebody chose to point at you for a reason a reader benefits from. That reason is what makes it stable: nobody removes it, and no pattern detection reclassifies it, because it is not part of a pattern.
Bought links have neither property. They exist because of a payment, they sit alongside other bought links on the same page, and they disappear when the payment or the site does.
- It stays up without anybody being paid to keep it there
- It sits inside content a real reader would read
- It is not surrounded by links to unrelated commercial sites
- It would still make sense to a person who clicked it
What we do instead, and why it is slower
Publish something with a reason to be cited: a figure somebody needs, a comparison nobody has written, a document that answers a regulatory question in your market. Then tell the people who write about that subject it exists.
It is slower and it produces fewer links. It also produces links that are still there in three years, and the arithmetic over that period is not close.
How to judge an agency's answer to this
Ask where the links will come from and ask to see three examples from another client. If the answer is a monthly number of links at a fixed price, you are buying placements whatever they are called, because nothing else can be promised by quantity.
Earned coverage cannot be quoted as a monthly quota. That is inconvenient in a proposal and it is the most reliable signal available to you.
What to take from this
- 01A bought link is rented, and the rankings fall when the rent stops working
- 02Durable links exist for a reason a reader benefits from
- 03Fewer, earned links outlast a monthly quota of purchased ones
- 04A fixed number of links per month is a placement scheme by another name
Ask the question directly
- What about paid guest posts and sponsored articles?
- Sponsorship is legitimate as advertising, and the link should be marked as paid. Marked links pass no ranking value, which is exactly why the ones sold for ranking are unmarked and exactly why they are risky.
- Should we remove links we bought previously?
- Remove what you can and disavow the rest if there is a clear pattern. It matters more that the practice stops, because the next devaluation is the one that costs you.
- Can we rank with no links at all?
- In less contested categories, frequently yes, particularly in Arabic where fewer people have written a good answer. Links matter most where several strong pages already answer the same question.
Related answers
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