Why You Shouldn’t Buy Links on EBay

by Tom Howlett on 5th August 2011

Why you shouldn’t buy links on EBay, or more appropriately why you shouldn’t buy links at all. This is a subject that constantly blights the world of SEO; buying links to benefit rankings goes against the codes of practice at Google and all other search engines, but yet it is still as prevalent as ever.

The fact that people still do it, and in such high numbers, opens the gates to people who think of the most advantageous link schemes in an attempt to make a bit of money. In this article I have included some existing schemes (including one on EBay, a particular favourite) and some others you might encounter on your journeys.

If you know of any others of course, make sure you let us know in the comments below. From the sublime to the ridiculous, there are so many out there that most people in SEO will bump into them at some time or another.

The Types of Link Building Schemes on EBay

EBay, the platform where anyone can list anything – well, mostly anything -is a favourite for various Link Building schemes and here are some favourites.

10 Million Link Submissions (Only £12.00)

You read it right, 10,000,000 link submissions, for a small cost of £12. A bargain you might initially think; however this is probably a bad idea.In fact, it is probably an absolutely awful idea.

Although this service will not result in 10 million indexed links, with many unfollowed and non permanent, think of how a search engine may view it if you suddenly received up to 10,000,000 links in a short period of time. Even the most popular site on the web would struggle to get this many naturally; for instance, Amazon.com only has 470,000 in total. The search engines are likely to just ignore all of these links or dish out some sort of penalty for the unnatural link profile.

Buy 10 Million Link Submissions Here……Actually don’t

Pyramid Backlink Services (£171.51 – Must be good)

A few listings sell link pyramid schemes, these services aim to build a certain number of links to your website, and then build links to those sites in an attempt to funnel link juice back through to your site. These are typically called link farms, built for the sole purpose of channelling link juice to a few websites. Now I am not saying these do not work, but any attempt to manipulate the search engines in this manner should be avoided. Google are constantly improving their search algorithm which makes it harder for a scheme like this to go unnoticed, so it’s better to avoid the risk – particularly as its being advertised so blatantly.

A nice pyramid

150 Search Engine Submissions (£24.99)

Could you name 150 search engines? Even if you could, there’s no way it would be worth adding a website to all 150. Plus if your website can be easily crawled just submitting to Bing and Google is a good enough start for any site. Some sellers even provide bundles of 150 submissions so you can then resell them on, so watch out for people who have bought this service and are selling it.

Not just 150 engines, 10×150!

50 PageRank 6 Backlinks (Only £22.05)

Many offer a certain number of backlinks from high PageRank websites. These can vary in number of links and cost, but essentially all offer the same service. Although we generally try and source links from good quality sites and PageRank can help assess the quality of the website in questions, there are many other factors that you should take into account prior to receiving the link. These include site quality, subject, relevance, number of links on page, likely position of your link and more. Most of these link schemes cannot guarantee meeting any of these factors; you may end up with a Page Rank 4 Backlink, however this is not likely to be worth the effort – especially if it’s coming from a spammy, irrelevant source.

All the Page Rank you can get here

1000 Facebook Likes (Just £11.99)

Bulk buying Facebook likes has got to be one of the most ridiculous schemes ever made. The whole point of getting people to Like your content is so it can appear on their walls and make their friends aware of the content. So bulk buying Likes doesn’t actually achieve anything as it only appears to the fake friends on the fake accounts. Plus from a Facebook point of view it’s unlikely the Likes will be regarded as having any authority.

1000 Guaranteed Likes

And More:

That’s one way to advertise links

10,000 links for just £11.95

Guranteed Page 1 listings, never a good thing

Wow Harvard are stooping to new lows to get links (Not really them)

35,000 visitors for $0.99. Shame they won’t buy anything

This link wheel service is called “link chaos”. Accurate

An actual robot that leaves blog comments!

And the best one of all:

Lolcats not included

Why are These Links Bad?

The title here should read ‘Why are most of these links bad’. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. If promised thousands of links for a relatively small amount of money or offered a certain number of high Page Rank backlinks, they are likely to not help your site at all. On the other hand, if you are essentially hiring someone to build good quality and relevant links for you own site, then this can prove highly beneficial – as long as it is done correctly.

We would always suggest building links internally and over time gradually increasing the number of good quality back links from different sources. Any massive increase in links in a short period of time is likely to look suspect from any search engine’s point of view.