Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Link Brokers Yes or No?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Link Brokers Yes or No?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    4
    2021
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • wearehappymedia
      wearehappymedia last edited by

      We have a client who has asked us to talk to link brokers to speed up the back linking process. Although I've been aware of them for ages I have never openly discussed the possible use of 'buying' links or engaging in that part of the industry. Do they have a place in SEO and if so what is the MOZ communities thoughts?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • BradsDeals
        BradsDeals last edited by

        My response is a big fat NOPE.

        If the client isn't happy with the speed of back linking, then it's time for an education session in which you stand up as the expert they hired you to be and explain exactly why it's a bad, bad idea.

        • Brokered links are often not contextual, which means they're not actually all that helpful.
        • They tend to come from low quality sites, which means they're not actually all that helpful.

        And that's just if you don't get caught. Getting away with black hat tactics is an intense, highly skilled, full-time endeavor. It's not a quick and easy way to anything. So even if you are willing to go there, given your inexperience with shady link building tactics, it's still a wretchedly bad idea since you've got no idea how to not get caught.

        Best thing to do is to build a content and outreach campaign that builds links in an above-board manner that no one can take issue with. Believe it or not, that's actually probably easier than anything that link buying would steer you into.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • TomRayner
          TomRayner last edited by

          John makes some good points.

          It's worth communicating those risks to your client and make them fully aware of what such activity could end up doing to your site.

          Now, occasionally, you might get a client who is happy to run the risk - they're happy to try and test and live with the consequences.  While I would usually steer them to try other avenues first, it could be that they're looking to run a test with a disposable domain.  So something like a link broker could come into play.

          But then why would you want to use a link broker?  If they're publicly selling links left right and centre, how good are the links going to be? What controls do you have in place? What other sites are on there? What if the broker takes the money and runs?

          So in that case, you not only have the penalty looming large over the website, but also the fact that you could literally be throwing money away.

          Sometimes trying new tactics can be rewarding - but link brokers? Cons always outweigh the pros, in my opinion.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
          • ClaytonJ
            ClaytonJ last edited by

            The below link is from google direct. Buying backlinks is an unacceptable practice.

            https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

            The community view would be not to do it.

            There are so many ways to get links with a little bit of effort, it is far smarter to head down that path. Plus and most importantly it lets you sleep at night. If you go down the dark side of a PBN etc. it will only be a timing issue until your site is penalized. Google is undertaking manual penalties it is doing whatever it can to thwart the practice. Some SEO companies will tell you they "outsmarted google"... 10,000 stamford graduates -v- a guy why just left his job as a security guard... I know who I would back.

            Hope that assists...

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 5
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Kingalan1

              How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?

              We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
              -8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
              -12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
              -38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
              0
            • Brett-S

              Link juice through URL parameters

              Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S
              0
            • MiguelSalcido

              Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them

              How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido
              0
            • Mark_Ch

              URL Value: Menu Links vs Body Content Links

              Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
              0
            • monali123

              How to detect a bad link and remove ?

              As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks. 
              Let me know, what you suggest.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
              0
            • BeytzNet

              How to properly link to products from category pages?

              Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
              http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
              Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
              0
            • cprodigy29

              Where to link to HTML Sitemap?

              After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy29
              0
            • VividLime

              Link Age as SEO factor?

              Hi Guys
              I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
              http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot'  In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
              Is link age factor in rankings ? If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.