Almost everybody knows the power that Google holds over the internet, you do not need to work in the search industry to know that if your website is not ranking on the top 3 pages, you might as well not exist. Depending on the business model in question, this can make or break your chances of long-term success.

With so many companies providing the same services and selling the same products, more and more are looking for ways to enhance their online offering. It’s true that providing added value can improve search engine performance and consumer confidence (think blogging, games, competitions etc) but most of the time a website needs raw link power in order to rank.

In case you don’t know, the major ranking factor for any website is in its backlink profile; that is, the number (and quality) of links pointing to the domain; this, for the main part, is what Google bases its rankings on.

The basic concept behind a good SEO campaign is to create content on the website that others will link to off their own back.

But this can be insanely difficult, especially when you take the type of business mentioned above; the ones whose product offering is not unique.

This is where purchasing links enters into the mix.

Many SEO campaigns now include some form of link buying, whether it is a blogroll link or a contextual link inside a blog post; it is a very popular means of improving “natural ranking”. I air-quote natural ranking, of course, because this manipulation of the ranking is anything but natural, and I believe it happens A LOT.

Buying a link for the purpose of increasing ones ranking within Google is completely against Google’s terms or service, and anybody caught doing it risks having their website penalised.

The reason that Google grits its teeth at link buyers is because it probably is the most powerful way of ranking a website. Even the bigger players are doing it – I’ve seen keyword rich links to some pretty big brand websites on various blogs.

So if everybody is buying links, what does this do to the supposedly organic listings? In short, it manipulates them to the point where they are no longer organic. It dilutes them with websites that have not truly earned their place at the top and it disrupts the otherwise “natural order” of things. I would hazard a guess that MOST of the popular search terms would yield “organic results” that have, in some way, been paid for.

I am certainly not pro-link buying but I’m not against it either; there are reasons for and against this method of SEO. If nobody bought links and instead concentrated on creating innovative hooks to their website, the playing field would be level, but is it any less level with so many people buying links instead? Probably not.

Disclaimer: This article really is just opinion and in no way fact. No research has gone into the true value of Google’s natural listings and I do not endorse the buying of links in order to increase ranking.