Buying text links means that you are purchasing ads on an external website that links back to your own site. It leads to increased site traffic, link popularity, and engine and website page rankings. Promoting your site on reputable, popular websites catrering to your target market is essential. Search Engines do not penalize you for buying text link ads.

Simply put, buying text links means that you are purchasing ads on an external website that links back to your own site. Buying the right text links could turn out to be an astute marketing move, since it could increase targeted site traffic, link popularity and, consequently, engine and page rankings. Advertising your site is smart, but promoting it on reputable, popular sites catering to your target market is even smarter. Search engines do not penalize your site for buying text link ads on ineffective sites, so you do not have to really worry about that; in that case, all you have to fret about is money badly spent.

For several years companies have searched for cost-effective ways to improve their site’s popularity, because having your ad on a “happening” site can really improve your link popularity and thus engine rankings. Many companies actually buy ads on sites not for the targeted audience they will attract, but to try to inflate site popularity.

Search engines know all about the practice of artificially “pumping” up a site’s popularity through linking, but that is not what they really envision when they think about links. Engines consider good links to be those leading to useful sites, which can contribute to the overall knowledge of a particular information community. For some time a link that really amounts to a trade between two sites has been frowned upon by engines, but until recently engines could not really tell the difference between those links that honestly referred a site and those that simply advertised it. To add to the dilemma, the engines could not tell people on which sites to advertise, and still can’t, since they also provide such services.

Web technology now allows search engines to better ascertain the actual intent of links, however, since text link ads and link-selling sites often leave decipherable “footprints” behind in the code. Engines can now more easily identify these ads and sites and can more accurately classify them as ads and not as honest site votes or referrals. These ads and sites are not being penalized; rather, they are simply not being allowed to count towards link popularity. A particular site’s engine rankings could really plummet if it depended somewhat on the link popularity of paid links. Google can now find and identify subsets of pages with similar paid link “footprints” and thus prohibit them from counting in the rankings, like they used to.

This discussion brings us back to the original question: should you be purchasing text links for your site? Given that search engines are moving quickly towards easier identification of paid text links, the short answer is: buyer beware! If you are obtaining paid links to truly increase site traffic or to give a short-term boost to your SEO campaign, then go ahead and good luck!

If you are purchasing them to improve link popularity, however, you should be warned that in the long-term paid links will not pay off. The wave of the future is that the engines will better ensure that paid links do not count towards link popularity, and those sites who now depend on this relationship will ultimately suffer. Other people who should watch out as well: link brokers whose bread and butter depends on selling text link ads!