The Dollar Factory

The risks of buying links for PageRank (PR)

At the present time, there is a large market for buying and selling links on websites for the purpose of increasing Google PageRank (PR) quickly. Webmasters either sell/buy links themselves via specialized forums such as digitalpoint or do it using link brokers such as Text-Link-Ads (TLA.)

There is obviously much hype surrounding PageRank, i.e., the magic number between 0 and 10 that Google uses to denote the importance of a website by counting the number and quality of sites linking to it. Webmasters obsess over the PageRank of their sites as one will immediately notice when visiting the Google and Link Building sections of the digitalpoint forum.

It is well known that links on sites with PR higher than 5 sell for a premium that could reach hundreds of dollars a month. A new site can quickly achieve a good PR by receiving links from PR5+ sites that belong in the same niche, i.e., a sports site is linked to by other sports sites. However, there are some subtle but high risks involved with buying links for the purpose of increasing PR.

First of all, it has been made clear by the outspoken Google engineer Matt Cutts that the PR value shown on the Google toolbar is not up to date. Google updates the PR of all websites at a frequency of a day or two (Matt Cutts video explanation of Google updates.) Once every 3 months on average, an older value of PR is rounded to the closest integer and then exported so that it can be displayed on the Google toolbar. What this means is that when you buy a link from a PR5 site, you are buying based on the importance of the site several weeks if not months ago. For all you know, it could be that by now Google has decreased the site’s importance in its index; equally, it could be that it has increased its value and so you could actually be getting more value for your money. It is not possible to tell either way since only Google knows the true PR of a site at any time.

Secondly, Google has said via its Official Google Webmaster Central blog that they are very much against webmasters buying links in order to manipulate PR values. Google prefers that a site develops inbound links naturally over time as a function of the quality and popularity of the site. This makes PR a better metric of the site’s value. As far as we currently know, Google does nothing to detect purchased links and penalize them. However, there is no guarantee that they won’t do so in the future. How would you feel if you spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on buying links only to wake up one morning to find your site banned from Google’s index? Is this a risk that you are willing to take?

I think that the risks associated with link buying for PR are not worth it. In my opinion, the only reason one should buy links should be for traffic. This is already possible via pay-per-click and CPM advertising programs such as AdWords, YPN, AdCenter, AdBrite and other smaller ones. There are of course risks associated with advertising on these networks as well but many of these risks can be reduced or eliminated with careful research of the site’s quality and quantity of traffic that it can potentially redirect to yours via a text ad.