For many IT startups that are still in their early stages, building a network of contacts and clients can be difficult, making link building a lot more challenging. Directly purchasing links is a viable strategy for improving rankings in these cases. Link buying involves directly acquiring backlinks through purchases instead of organically building connections to acquire them.

If you’re an IT expert or business looking to improve your content visibility through link buying, here is everything you need to know!

Pros and Cons of Link Buying

Before you buy permanent links, here are the pros and cons you should consider carefully.

The Pros

• As a new startup, organic link building will take considerable time and effort and you won’t see the results initially. If you want to quickly boost the visibility of your IT and operations content, link buying can be a good way to kickstart the process. 
• Having diverse anchor texts and referring domains makes your website look more genuine and authoritative. By purchasing diverse links, you can create a more rounded link profile for your website. 
• You also have the chance to purchase links from major publications that you can’t get through organic link building. Links obtained from major authority sites can significantly improve your overall domain and page authority.
• Link building is a time and resource heavy task that requires extensive research, outreach, and content creation. In comparison, buying links takes less effort and shows results passively a lot faster, making it a good investment. 

The Cons

• Without proper planning, your links may appear shady and unnatural to Google's algorithm, which could result in your content getting flagged for spam or other penalties. Moreover, your seller’s links may get penalized too, which can lower the credibility of your own website. 
• If you buy links carelessly, you might end up wasting your money on low impact or suspicious links, which do more harm than good to your SEO ranking. 
• Most links are bought in the form of paid subscriptions to maintain their permanence on your website. Paying for the subscription may end up becoming costly in the long run compared to organically building links that remain free. 
• Links acquired from sellers usually have limited editorial control. You won’t be able to choose the context, anchors, and link placement location with a paid link versus organic link.

How to Strategize Link Buying

If you want to make the most out of link buying, you need to know how to use them smartly. With effective planning and strategizing, your acquired links will provide great value: 

Balance Between Paid and Organic Links

A good SEO strategy in link building is to have a mix of paid and organic links in your profile. Having paid links relieves some of the stress of organic link building, but you shouldn’t be completely dependent on them. 

Use paid links to diversify your profile, anchors, and geo-locations. While the paid links passively boost your website, you can use a part of your IT Team to continue your organic link building efforts.

Quality of Links

Always research link sellers before you purchase links from them. Make sure that the links you’re buying are from credible sources. Avoid sellers who have several duplicate and low-quality pages that only exist for the purpose of inserting links. Your links should look natural, so don’t use links that are irrelevant to your niche, or look obviously paid and sponsored. 

These kinds of links barely provide any customer satisfaction or value to your readers and Google bots can easily detect them as unfair attempts to manipulate rankings. You should always request samples and metrics of link performance from your seller. 

Monitor Link Performance and Anomalies

Make it a habit to regularly check your entire link profile for any potential problems. You should look for unnatural patterns in anchor text or keyword density on your pages. Next, watch out for fluctuations in the number or location of domains or URLs linking to your site. If you stay proactive and spot any irregularities early on, you can address them before they lead to penalties.

Spread Links Gradually

Don’t spam your content with hundreds of paid links as soon as you acquire them. Instead take a slow and steady approach in spreading them by mixing them up with organic links. This way, you can avoid alerting Google bots and easily assess link performance before investing in more links. 

Conclusion 

Link buying can have many benefits but it is also risky. If not planned out correctly, your link buying efforts will be for nothing, and you will end up wasting your investment. With our guide, you should be able to understand these risks and know how to apply a strategic approach to link buying. If done right, link buying can help you see results quickly and boost your link building efforts significantly.