Former baseball star Barry Bonds has long been accused of taking steroids, because of the huge improvements in his game and the questionable company he keeps. But the career home run champion never failed a drug test and never admitted to cheating. Despite the lack of solid evidence against him, Bonds will probably never make the Baseball Hall of Fame. The lesson? The taint of bad behavior will hurt you, even if nothing is ever proven.
Companies associated with Anglo Rank are the search engine optimization equivalent of athletes with a suspicious reputation. Anglo Rank is a paid link service that cloaked its business by using links it said were from other private networks; it then marketed its services to companies by claiming it left “no footprints.” Google busted Anglo Rank earlier this month, noting that those “other” networks were actually its own, and began penalizing the company’s customers. This serves as a cautionary tale for relying on paid link networks to improve your search ranking.
Defining a Paid Link Network
In its simplest form, a link network is a group of sites connected to one another through a single owner or a group of owners. Some networks are upfront about their ties. Some try to cover them up, though they’re generally traceable through a digital footprint.
Paid link networks are essentially shopping marts for search rankings. You tell your contact at the network which keywords you’d like to target. They plant links to your company’s page using those keywords in copy on their linked sites. The keyword is often plugged into the copy incongruously, like a reference to tractor rentals in a post about yummy cookie recipes on a mommy blog. It’s an extremely simple way to buy search rankings, because the business only has to contact one person and doesn’t have to worry about scrambling to place the content itself.
The biggest complaint about link networks, besides the obvious Google issues, is that the quality of the content is often very low. That’s a real issue for any business trying to build traffic at a time when excellent content has become increasingly important. Google specifically notes in its Webmaster Tools section on link schemes that good content pays off with higher search rankings. But because paid link networks have so many sites, there’s no time to fill each one with smart, analytical posts.
Playing the Odds
For a long time, paid link services delivered on what they promised, pumping up search rankings for companies in exchange for a monthly fee. But Google began cracking down on paid link networks in 2012. The Google Venice update phased out the method the engine had used to evaluate certain links. The aim was to put an end to the practice in order to reward organic backlinks that had been achieved without using black hat techniques, putting a greater emphasis on quality content.
Still, the results delivered by these link services were so good that many companies felt they had little choice but to use them. Their competitors would surely be employing them, went the logic, and so they couldn’t afford to ignore them lest they lose ground. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like the reasoning many baseball players have cited for using steroids.
The Bitter Consequences
But even though there can be an upside to association with a company such as Anglo Rank, the potential downsides are much more serious. Google has been in crackdown mode the past few weeks, and Anglo Rank was only the first site to be busted. Since then, the search engine has also targeted Backlinks.com, which claimed to provide paid links undetectable by Google search bots, and more are in store. Google even publicly called out Backlinks on Twitter.
Playing It Safe
Ultimately it’s up to your business to decide whether you want to risk being penalized by Google for associating with one of these companies. You can never be sure if the service will be discovered and targeted by Google. Certainly you could see some great search results in the interim. But in the long term, you’re putting your company’s search ranking at risk.
The safer bet is to employ a trusted SEO company or hire a consultant to use better SEO practices to increase your company’s search rankings through legitimate practices. Say you own a business focused on providing superior notary services. There are many things you could do to improve your ranking, from focusing on high-quality content to overhauling your social media strategy to guest blogging that’s on the up-and-up.
The bottom line? There’s too much risk involved in using a paid link network. It’s easy to get sucked into trying one out, but the consequences of being penalized by Google aren’t worth your money or your reputation.