When not to Buy Links

Stay away from paid directories, links from such are at risk of getting devalued.

Directories who claim you will get traffic from links that you buy with them are either faking the traffic, or mostly lying. You likely don't want to buy links purely for their SEO value, because then your efforts might be spend better elsewhere.

Your link may be seen by many webmasters looking to submit their own sites. But that doesn't mean those seeing it are interested in your site or services. People generally don't use directories, there are few exceptions to this of cause. But the point is, if you must buy your links, do at least stick to relevant sites of high quality.

Dmoz is an example where other sites on the web, sometimes implement smaller bits of the directory for their users. This can either be done manually, or automated on the server-side.

Penalized for buying or selling links

A lot of sites have been Punished for selling links, its however very unlikely that you will be punished for buying links. You will at most lose the value from the links that the search engines suspect being paid, and if that happens, it might look like you have been punished.

Link farms are more or less just poor quality directories. Now if you happen to buy links in such directories, and these directories lose their ability to pass on link juice, you will just have wasted your money, since their only purpose is spam.

Its often hard to tell if someone is selling links, unless we are talking a directory, or unless they offer it directly on their site. But even when they offer it directly, search engines should always take into account their intention. Is it just a review fee? Or a way to get some sponsors for the site? Are all sites accepted, regardless of their quality?

While you can go very far to hide your activities as a link seller, it might be better to be honest about it, since you might be able to attract some higher-quality advertisers this way.

But it should be said, that whatever connection you have with advertisers, is your own business and not really relevant to your users. In a lot of cases it may be more legit to buy a link, than it is to place links manually. Spamming links is worse than buying links after all!

When to nofollow and when not to nofollow

Nofollow has created a trust issue for people, where they basically criminalize all sites, without considering why they are linking to these sites. If you want to use nofollow, chances are you shouldn't be linking to the site in the first place. There's a group of extremists who think that all ads should be nofollowed, but unless everyone where evil spammers, their view doesn't make sense.

Matt cutts, while head of Google web spam team, also stated that they don't always hit down on sites who sell links, the quality of the site is taken into their considerations. This was in relation with directories, now imagine how huge a step it is to punish a site whos focus is more then links.

If you want to sell a link, be it image or text link, and you don't like the site, then it would be fine to use nofollow. Use your own common sense here, why would you even accept an ad for some irrelevant spam site? Adsense throw those on all the time, and its hard for us to do anything about it. Surely we should leave the few links we do sell to high-quality sites? If you took the time to review the sites, then you shouldn't be afraid not to use nofollow.

To show your good intentions, maintain a policy on the links you accept. For example, links could be free for non-commercial sites. You could then chose to require payment for commercial stuff, which would be sites with ads, or sites that are selling something.

You will often find that the paid links on a site speak for themselves, if they link for spam content, then its just obvious that the site owner where either careless, or just after the cash.