People also ask
In practice
Google’s own examples, in plain terms: selling or buying links that pass search-engine trust, large-scale reciprocal linking (“you link to me, I link to you”), automated link creation in comments and forums, richly-keyworded anchor text in article-directory or guest-post programmes, parasite SEO that abuses another site’s authority, and PBNs — networks of sites built to sell links rather than to publish. The common thread is intent: the link exists to move a ranking, not because a human found it useful to readers.
Buyers systematically underestimate how much of the link-building retail market is precisely this. A package of “high DR backlinks” with no editorial story behind it, a site stuffed with “write for us” and “advertise with us” pages, links placed by a crawler of scraped contact emails — these are schemes with a nice dashboard. The risk does not distribute evenly: the site that receives the links carries the manual action or the algorithmic devaluation, while the vendor keeps the fee and moves to the next client.
One honest nuance the industry under-discusses: a paid placement that never declares itself is technically against Google’s guidance, and search engines can devalue such links whenever they like. That is why we tell a buyer which placements involved a publisher fee before approval — the devaluation risk travels with the link, and pretending otherwise transfers it invisibly. For AI visibility the concern is adjacent: model training and retrieval do not grade links as schemes, but they do inherit a poisoned web, so clean inputs remain the better long-term bet.
See also: PBNs, Reciprocal links and link exchanges.
Related service: Link insertions.
