Cheap Backlinks: Are They Worth The Pain? 
Backlinks are the buzz word today in every SEO war room. Sites are flaunting them, selling them, buying them and doing all sorts of odd freaky things. It seems backlinks are becoming as good as money in web world.
But, do leveraging backlinks make any sense, especially, in post-Panda algorithm days? There is no black and white answer to this question. Want to know why? Read on.
Why Backlinks are getting God-like status?
Everybody knows that the reason lies within the search engine world. Search giants like, Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, use backlinks as reputation-measuring tool for websites. The logic is well-promoted. If any site links back to your site, it means, link-forwarding site respects your site for any reason, whatever that may be.
This equates a simple fallacy, which means more backlinks lead to more respect and more respect means better Page Rank or ranking in search engine result pages for any particular topic.
The end result is websites slogging for backlinks.
All genuine search engines categorically nix trading of backlinks but that hardly stops anybody from exchanging backlinks for monetary benefit. Many sites depend heavily on backlinks for better PR. There are too many shoddy dealers around; who even sell backlinks in bunches, just like any over-the-counter commodity.
But do those cheap commoditized links work?
They don’t of course. Not only that, such cheap bulk backlinks are full of blowback too.
- Google already unleashed Panda algorithm to reign over the malpractice of backlinking. Effects are already visible for all competitive and common keywords. Even relevant backlinks are not as effective today as they were earlier, let alone bulk irrelevant software-generated backlinks.
- Considering the vast size of the web world, you can, though, succeed in fooling algorithm for some obscure and ultra-specific keywords. But don’t expect your victory to last long.
- Cheap bulk link building services depend on software. Software hardly cares relevance of links, content matching or usability of link-followers. With cheap link services, you can get dofollow back links from even engineering related sites when you actually sell baby-care products. In most of the cases, these links are nothing but spam. And no legitimate business owner likes dealing with spam, because they are serious legal offence.
- Besides, you can’t rely on cheap backlinks as a long-term strategic tool. Being a spam, they often disappear into air. And the worst is you have no one to fall back on for your loss.
What to do then?
Having said all these, you can still use backlinks in your favor because search engines still use them to measure your sites’ online reputation. But you have to be more cautious and less fraudulent.
- Use backlinks in a very slow pace. Remember not to alert search crawlers. Only couple of backlinking is more than enough for a week.
- Always take care of link-originating page and linked page. They must match in terms of relevance. Take care of content and keywords too.
- Do not overuse any keyword or anchor word. Search engines take any overuse as spamming.
- Try to develop organic backlinks from true authority sites and directories. This takes time but never fails to pay.
At last, you must remember, blackhat practices are too tempting but no genuine search engine likes you playing with their well-guarded reputation. So, do not call for their wrath. In the world of internet marketing they can simply bury you down.
Alyssa Clarke is a blogger who also happens to be a tech lover. She is always on a look out for latest tech stuff and is currently hunting for some cool Mac apps. She recently read about the Toggle touch remote control and desperately wants to own it.
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