How Cheap Backlinking Services Can Kill Your Website?

You’ve probably seen those gigs on fiver.com that offer thousands of backlinks for just a few dollars. When trying to build the reputation of your website, they can be hard to ignore. Everyone knows that more links is better, right? Wrong. The truth is that cheap backlinking services can actually harm your website and can potentially cripple your business.

The reality is, quantity is still important when building links to your website. But quality is important too. Some might argue that it’s more important. When trying to optimise your site for Google (and other search engines), you’ll probably know that you need a good number of links to jump up the rankings. Google looks at a number of metrics and uses a range of algorithms to decide which sites are important for any given term. One of the main ways it decides whether a site is “important” for a specific keyword is by seeing how many other sites link to it. That’s why backlinks are crucial in the web-marketing arena.

More Backlinks, More PagaRank?

However, more backlinks isn’t necessarily better. Most search engines like to see organic, natural looking growth. Any site that suddenly jumps from zero to ten thousand backlinks overnight isn’t going to look right. It’s going to look artificial and forced. Google penalises sites which look suspicious. A couple of cheap backlinking gigs could see your site put on a blacklist and bumped down the rankings. That could destroy your business. That’s not to say that all low-end services and gigs are bad. Some can offer real benefits to your business. But you really need to know what you’re looking for.

You’ll probably have seen sites ranking high for terms even though they don’t actually have anywhere near as many backlinks as their rivals. That’s because Google also looks at a number of other measures like the age of the site and the relevance towards a particular keyword. Another reason is because certain backlinks are worth more than others. In other words, certain sites have “authority”, which is often determined by PageRank.

Where To Get BackLinks?

PageRank, or PR, is a measure from 0 to 10 of how “authoritative” a site is. Although ten is the highest, you’re probably only realistically going to be able to get links from PR5 sites at the most. Any new site will automatically have a PR of zero, and links from such sites are worth the least. You could have hundreds of PR0 backlinks where just a handful of higher PR ones could be just as good.

You can get a number of PR2 or 3 links without too much trouble. But remember – grow your site naturally. Most search engines are looking for “normal” sites, not ones that suddenly become overnight sensations. Sticking to a plan of getting a few backlinks every day for a number of months will look much better than suddenly getting them all over night. You should also focus your energy on getting quality links from authoritative (high PR) sites, rather then getting bucket-loads of worthless ones. More isn’t always better, and cutting corners could kill your website.

About the Author:
Peter Ellington has been involved in marketing for almost two decades. When he needs essays written, he uses Essay Jedi.

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