Potential Risks and Penalties Associated With Purchasing Backlinks

With the increasing importance of backlinks in SEO, some website owners are tempted to take shortcuts by purchasing backlinks from various sources. While this may seem like a quick and easy way to boost your website’s ranking, it can come at a significant cost.

Explaining why it is essential to focus on building high-quality backlinks organically, we present the potential risks and penalties that your website could suffer if you engage in this spammy practice.

Risks

Purchasing backlinks comes with several issues that make it not worthwhile. Because it is a type of link spamming, your website could suffer in various ways, even without search engine penalties.

1. Loss of Trustworthiness

Backlinks are essential for improving website rankings in search engine results. However, purchasing backlinks from spammy or low-quality websites will harm your website’s reputation and trustworthiness.

Users may become suspicious if they notice that your website has backlinks from irrelevant or untrustworthy sources, making them consider your site less reliable.

With the Eye10 Backlink Checker, you can discover where your backlinks are coming from and compare them by category.

2. Wasted Investment

Spending money on backlinks can easily be wasted if the purchased backlinks fail to boost your website’s rankings or bring in traffic.

Search engines like Google continually update their algorithms to identify and penalize websites with unnatural or spammy backlinks. This further harms your investment.

3. Poor User Experience

The primary goal of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and useful search results.

When you purchase backlinks, you have little control over the quality of the websites linking to your site. If your users are led to low-quality or irrelevant content, the result is an inevitably poor experience.

This, in turn, leads to higher bounce rates, lower engagement, and decreased trust in your website.

4. Damage to Brand Image

It reflects poorly on your brand and damages your credibility when your website is associated with websites with a negative reputation, especially the ones known to engage in unethical or illegal activities.

Potential customers are handed a reason to distrust you, and your sales and revenue bottom line will suffer. The perception of your brand by your customers and stakeholders is essential to your success, and any negative association can have long-lasting effects.

5. Poor Website Security

Most backlinks purchased through link spams contain malicious and harmful code that may put your website at risk of security breaches.

If you purchase backlinks from websites infected with malware or have other security vulnerabilities, you could expose your website and its visitors to potential harm.

Besides all the effects already listed, you could even get caught in a web of legal issues if a harmed visitor files an official complaint with the authorities.

6. Long-Term Negative Impacts

Purchasing backlinks may result in short-term gains in search engine rankings, but it will most likely negatively impact your website’s performance.

This is partly because these link spam specialists often make removing the harmful links sold, even if you write to them, difficult or impossible.

The only exception is when you disavow the links, and even this is not 100% reliable. So, years after engaging in link spamming, your website may suffer.

7. Missing out on the Benefits of Natural Link Building

Finally, concerning the risks, there is also the fact that purchasing backlinks are not worth it. Absolutely nothing is better than a purely organic link-building strategy.

When you naturally earn backlinks through high-quality content, relationships, and engagement with your audience, you build a strong, sustainable foundation for your website’s success.

In contrast, purchasing backlinks has many thorny issues that could take years to resolve. Instead, use the Eye10 Backlink Monitor tool to track the backlinks you attract constantly.

Penalties

Considering the risks, we’ll examine how search engines such as Google penalize websites where link spamming is detected.

1. Manual Action Penalty

A Google web spam team member imposes a manual action penalty once they notice a website violating its quality guidelines.

If Google identifies that you are buying backlinks, a manual penalty may cause you to notice a sudden drop in your website’s ranking or removal from certain search results.

When Google does this, they usually email the webmaster to notify them of the action taken, why it was taken, and what the website owner must do to appeal the action and comply with the guidelines.

2. Algorithmic Penalty

Google’s algorithm is designed to identify spammy backlinks and penalize websites that use them to manipulate their rankings.

This applies to other search engines too, and as anyone in the industry would have noticed, these algorithms get more sophisticated year after year. If a new update to the algorithm targets an innovative form of link spamming, you will also notice a sudden drop in your rankings.

However, algorithmic penalties are harder to identify and recover from than manual actions, as Google does not explicitly communicate them. The best way to avoid algorithmic penalties is always to follow the best practices recommended by Google.

3. Blacklisting and De-Indexing

This is when Google decides that your site is so low-quality or harmful that it removes it entirely from its index and prevents it from appearing in search results. It’s the ultimate penalty that a website can suffer from a search engine.

If your website is blacklisted, you must have committed a serious offense or been caught repeatedly breaching the rules. Either way, it is a sign of a very serious problem, and it is often highly difficult to recover from the effects of this, even if your site is later re-added to the index.

Conclusion

The last important point is this: to ensure that your website is not at risk of being penalized or blacklisted by search engines, it’s crucial to monitor your backlinks regularly.

Of course, it is difficult to achieve this manually, but when you utilize the Eye10 Backlink Checker and Backlink Monitor tools, you become unstoppable. These tools, with other SEO tools, cost only $39 combined, at least $60 less than most of the other tools on the market, but with the same features and more: real-time data and clear insights. Sign up for Eye10 here today.