Why Is It Wrong to Buy Backlinks?
By: Scott Beckman
Tags: Google, Marketing, SEO, Ethics, Backlink

Why Is It Wrong to Buy Backlinks?

It’s not about penalties, it’s about who you are

Photo by Kaley Dykstra on Unsplash

I recently read a diatribe against Google on Quora.

The poster was responding to a question about link buying, which is a black hat SEO tactic that goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Here’s a quick explanation of link buying for any non-SEOs: Google looks at links to your site as an indicator of its worth — the more and the higher quality the links to your site are, the higher your site is likely to rank. Buying links, therefore, means paying other websites to link to yours.

Essentially, the poster was arguing that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with buying links. That “black hat SEO” is a term Google invented and an idea that Google pushes on webmasters to increase its own profits.

This is partly true. Google’s guidelines are just that: guidelines. Suggestions. There is no law saying you can’t do whatever you like to get rankings on Google. At least, nobody is going to put you in jail or sue you for it.

So why shouldn’t we buy links? Why not do whatever we can to raise our website in Google’s rankings, especially if it could bring in more revenue?

First, while there’s no law against it, Google is free to do whatever it likes to those that break their guidelines. They are an absolute ruler of their (pun intended) domain.

So if they catch you breaking their guidelines, they can remove your website from the results. That means no traffic for you. No leads. No sales.

Now, maybe you’d earn enough additional revenue from your site before it’s penalized to make the black hat SEO worthwhile, but you’re taking a risk.

That being said, penalties are not the main reasons to avoid black hat SEO. The most important reason is because you’re a good person.

Say you could hack into Facebook and change all its display ads to ones advertising your business. There’s almost no chance of being caught and you’ll get more sales. Do you do it?

Say you could organize a street team and change all the billboards near your business to advertise your product overnight. No chance of being caught but definitely more exposure. Do you do it?

Heck, let’s say there was no law against poisoning your closest competitor. No backlash for it, just more sales. Do you do it?

No.

No, of course you don’t.

Because even though these tactics may work, they’re unethical. Whether you get caught or not.

It doesn’t matter if you increase revenue if you had to cheat and lie and steal to get there. And it doesn’t matter if cheating or lying or stealing is illegal and will bring the police after you. It’s still morally and ethically wrong.

So why is black hat SEO ethically wrong?

Because you’re lying to Google’s ranking algorithms. And it’s their business what those ranking algorithms do. It’s up to Google how it ranks websites on its own search engine.

You don’t get to decide if Google’s method of ranking websites is right or wrong. Google does. Not you.

If you manipulate Google’s algorithms, you’re cheating the system. There’s no law against it. You might not even be caught and penalized. But you’re cheating. You’re stealing traffic that doesn’t belong to you.

Here’s the good news:

Google wants what searchers want. It wants what you want, as a consumer. As a human being.

Google makes its billions of dollars from Google Ads — basically from businesses that are willing to pay to get high rankings and premium placement on the Google platform.

If someone is going to make money from companies willing to pay for rankings, it should be Google, not black hat SEOs.

Google built the platform. They have the top search engine. They built it, so they deserve the revenue it generates.

And again, they want what we want. Google only makes its billions of dollars in revenue if people use it. People only use it, instead of its competitors, if Google consistently provides the very best answers to their queries.

So the better Google gets at effectively ranking websites, the more people use it because they get what they’re looking for.

Consumers win because Google answers their queries. Companies win because they can pay Google to show up on the first page through AdWords or they can simply be the very best at what they do and trust that Google will rank them accordingly. And Google wins because it makes money from the companies that are willing to pay for advertising.

Black hat SEOs throw this whole everybody-wins system askew. They mess with Google’s rankings. They make it so websites that don’t best answer consumer queries show up instead of those that do. They lessen the search experience for everyone. And they cost Google advertising revenue that it deserves because it grew from humble beginnings to become the most popular search engine in the world.

Black hat is ethically wrong and it harms society as a whole. Link buying, as a black hat strategy, is wrong.

Don’t give in. You’re better than that. Better at marketing and, hopefully, better as a person.