What Is Paid Linking
Paid Linking is the name given to the process where a webmaster or a person acting on behalf of the website pays for links to be placed on an independent website online; this link will be a link to the website who pays for that specific link. Ethical Link building is an important SEO technique, links play an important role in increasing the page rank and credibility of a website. Although search engines do not like paid linking methods, they prefer links to occur naturally - For instance an article found on the Internet is interesting and relevant therefore the reader links to the article writer on their website. This is the type of natural linking the search engines like to see and credit a site for.
Categorically speaking there are two main methods of paid linking, below I have gone into further detail about the two methods.
1. Paid Link Directories
This is where webmasters or website owners submit their website to a specific paid directory such as Best Of The Web or Yahoo Paid Directory. By submitting their website they are paying for the directory to review their site, if the directory like the site, if it meets certain directory requirements then the site will be displayed within the directory. Paid directories are not a guaranteed link, the website owner is paying for their site to be reviewed - The link may be accepted or it may not be accepted.
2. Paid Linking
Paid linking is where a website owner approaches another website asking for a link to be placed on their site for a fee. This can either be accepted or not by the potential link donor website. A price is agreed between the two sites and a fee paid for the link. This can take place where the website owner approaches another website or the website owner could go through a link broker who will agree a price on their behalf.
Search engines particularly do not like the second method of paid linking detailed above, this is because it presents an unfair advantage to those websites who have more money to spend on linking. The websites that have more money to spend may not be as relevant or content rich as the website that has less to spend on linking; although because they have more money to spend they are more likely to get the link. This distorts the search engine rankings as they may rank a site that is not as relevant or informative higher than the page that is relevant just because the non relevant site has a high Pagerank due to linking purposes. In short paid linking can weaken the search engine results, search engines do not like this. Therefore search engines such as Google are becoming wise to paid linking efforts and will penalise sites found to be taking part in paid linking.
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