Last month, I asked if buying text link ads were a waste of money because its effects on link popularity and SEO in general were diminishing as search engines such as Google improve their algorithms.

I stumbled upon this story over at Webmaster World that seems to prove that not only is buying paid links a waste of money, it can actually hurt your rankings!

F_Rose posts asking:

I have purchased a link from a PR6 relevant site. They have placed our link on their navigation which causes a sitewide link. We have approximately 5,000 links listed in Google Webmaster and Yahoo Link Manager from this particular site?

Should I have them remove the link? Could this hurt us in any way?

By the next day, there was some major changes on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages):

Google has flagged it before we even had a chance to cancel contract.
They dropped us for our keywords drastically and some keywords they dropped us completely..

If you’re looking at buying links to build traffic, it may be worthwhile but if you are looking at buying text links to build inbound links for search engine optimization then you may want to do some further research.

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Other posts you may be interested in:

  • Google: Report Sites Buying Or Selling Text Links
  • The Real Reason Google Doesn’t Like Paid Links
  • (aff) = Affiliate Links Where I Get Paid
  • Is Buying Links A Waste Of Money?
  • Top 5 Mistakes To Avoid When Building Links