At Firefly we are a professional agency that provides SEO services, our team is highly knowledgeable about the best SEO practices including link building. So we certainly know a thing or two and are here to help you. Do we think it’s important to be buying backlinks in 2020? It is better to build links rather than outright buy them as they need to be high quality and relevant links and here's why it’s so important for the success of your SEO marketing strategy. Our approach is quality over quantity. But we will start off with the basics first.
A backlink is a link created when a website links to another through an internal URL link embedded into the content on a web page. Backlinks can also be called "inbound links" or "incoming links." High quality and relevant backlinks are an important part of an SEO strategy, as they enable search engines such as Google to help discover and rank content.
Yes backlinks do work, as they enable search engines to rank your website higher as you are offering the highest quality of content with relevance and value to searchers. But search engines understand the difference between high quality, relevant links and dodgy ones. So it is very important to be using the right type of links within your site, if you don't want to risk being jeopardised otherwise.
Buying low quality backlinks is a waste of time and money, it’s also against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Best case scenario is that Google ignores the bad links, worst case scenario is that they will give your site a manual penalty, which is incredibly hard to get rid of.
Most forms of buying backlinks Google is against, though many SEO experts will point out that the data doesn't necessarily match with that statement. However, Google is particularly against the exchange of money for links in return. This exchange of money can happen in many ways, and Google doesn’t say that all these “link schemes” will definitely lead to a negative impact on your website’s search engine rankings. Rather, it says that these schemes “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”. The takeaway from this should be that the more direct and obvious an exchange of money is in return for a link, the less natural it is. The less natural it is, the more likely Google is to punish it. The reason Google uses “can” and not “will” is that there are some link building strategies which — while they involve money — are not as direct as paid-for links. So it is much better to work on building organic links that hold value and relevance to your content.
Yes, backlinks still matter for SEO. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages when a person is searching that certain topic or query. But buying links is rarely worth the money. Why? Because it’s riskier and more expensive than building “natural” links (in most cases). So, if you are going to pay for links, it is important that you are investing your money in the right type of backlinks that offer value and are of high quality - that's where our agency comes in to help. As we have an expert team with a high knowledge about high quality backlinks while also focusing on other important factors that improve SEO. We do more than just great SEO, at Firefly we provide a full service approach to digital marketing including strategy, pay per click, social media, content marketing, website design, and agile marketing, all of which work together perfectly under one-roof. Our in-house digital marketing team are ready to help you achieve your goals so get in touch with us today for a no obligation quote.