Weigh paid backlinks against the risk of a penalty

This blew up a bit more than I expected so I thought I'd add a bit of context and nuance to my point.

There is a real divide in the replies between people who have worked in SEO for a long time and those who haven't.

Those who have never experienced your entire business being removed/invisible from Google maybe don't see the risk vs reward the same way as those who have.

If you do enough outreach for backlinks you'll find out that many sites sell them. There are spreadsheets where you can literally pick and choose from a variety of niches and prices.

So you have a service like Outrank that creates a menu like this and sells those links to its customers. The demand for this is clearly very high based on the responses from Tibo's launch.

When demand is high and you already have a network of sites willing to sell, it's fair to assume that those selling sites will link out to more and more Outrank customers.

Easy money for the seller to just add another post or insert a link into an existing one. Pretty soon you have a very clear pattern that this site is selling links.

And so you look at the other sites that link to the same URLs. It's trivial to correlate these and find all of the sellers and all of the buyers for me - for Google 1000x so.

This is what you call a PBN (private blog network) and it's one of the fastest ways to get manual penalties - for both seller and buyer.

At best: the links will do nothing and Google will simply ignore them.

At worst: your site will disappear from Google overnight.

The argument against me is that you could just submit your competitors and take them out of Google. It trivialises the very real risk that you take whenever you buy links. The risk is significantly higher when it's promoted in a public forum like X.

Manual actions for unnatural links aren't as common as they once were because the spam algorithm detects them and ignores them but that risk profile changes when you start using a very public service (ironically getting more visibility because I raised concerns with it).

@Marie_Haynes has been the expert in this field for many years and she said this in 2024, which is still relevant today:

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"I could just point links at my competitor then and get them penalized."

The thing is, it's not the links themselves that get sites penalized. It's the patterns that are consistent with building links to manipulate rankings. Google has many years of experience in identifying patterns of Link manipulation.
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Many SEOs build their own PBNs to control the volume of links, content quality and relevance of them to avoid patterns but it is still a risk assessment they make. It's just done by people who fully understand the consequences because they have experienced it before.

Tibo replied and said that I was hating, but that was not my intention, although I can see how the original post was a little sensationalist and absolute.

Is it a 100% guarantee that your site specifically will get penalized? No. There is significant risk to doing it and my bet is that eventually (and maybe sooner than you think) you will lose Google traffic.

It may not be all-or-nothing. It may be that every algorithm update brings a new drop in traffic over time until the site no longer ranks for any of the things that matter - maybe even your own brand name.

This is all just my opinion based on my experiences of selling and buying many links through many eras of Google algorithm updates.

Use Outrank, don't use Outrank, but at least know and accept the risks if you do. Their landing page does not explain the risks outside of a tiny FAQ that barely scratches the surface.

Finally: make sure you are building an email list, a reddit/Facebook/Discord community and experimenting with paid ads as well.

Nobody should rely on search engines.