Bought Links -- Get Rid of Them or Not!!

[chirosche]

Hi All,

Well, I have some good news. About 5 weeks ago, my site went into exile on Google and yesterday, it reappeared just as mysteriously as it disappeared for all my keywords. When it did disappear, I had canonicalization done, supplemental pages removed and set up my Google webmaster tools. I also manually cleaned up the keyword spamming in the meta and alt tags. All in all, the changes I feel were productive for my site.

I tried not to panic and set about building up backlinks to my site by submitting my site to hundreds of new directories. I wrote more articles and submitted them to several directories and I'm still doing that. Then yesterday, it came back.

A couple days ago, I cancelled all my paid links. Now here's the deal. Do I UNCANCEL THEM. I am so afraid that if I don't uncancel them now after getting by old position back, that once Google sees them gone (and I've had them for over a year), that my site will disappear again. They are still "live" and not set to expire until 03 May. My PR went down a while back when everybody elses went down, but when that happened, my keyword position actually improved, this just before it disappeared.

Now I'm back where I was, page 1 and 2 for my keywords and now I don't know what to do about my paid links. I really like two of them as one is totally relevant for my site and is natural for visitors there to visit my site, while the other two are a science site and and a newspaper.

What to do??? Do you think Google has already discounted the links from these three sites and removing them will not have an impact, or will removing them cause yet another undesired shift and cause me to go into exile again. Or, is there really no way of knowing?

By the way, it is not the site listed in my signature at the bottom. I prefer not to put it here because these forum posts end up on page one of the search engines when someone searches for me by my business name on the web and I prefer privacy.

Thank you,
Beverly

[inertia]

Id keep paying for them. Especially the relevant one and especially if you are getting positive traffic through them. I suppose its about ROI.

Are they high PageRank?

[chirosche]

Well the relevant one went down in PR as so many did, but the Science site and the Newspaper are quite high.

I saw a post in this forum where a member said get rid of all paid links and I got quite concerned. I already UNCANCELED the relevant one. They don't bring a lot of traffic, when I first purchased them, my PR went up from 4 to 5 and I had over 100 PR pages on my site. But now it's 3 on the home page. So do you think that Google could have assessed these links and that my present position is based on this assessment?

Thanks

[inertia]

Don't worry too much about PR drops. This is Google moving the goal posts. Sometimes there's too much PR flying about so Google drops the benchmarks. If you loose positions when your PR drops then start to worry.

I have personally seen people pay for 100s of high PR, irrelevant links and never be penalised. We are talking about a hand full of links here and i really wouldn't worry about it. Keep them there!

If you had 100s of paid links then it would be a bit different...

[chirosche]

If you had 100s of paid links then it would be a bit different...

You mean 100s different sites right, because these sites do have 100s of pages the links are on.

[incrediblehelp]

Hard to say without looking at them, but if your buying links because they help you rank and not because they bring in traffic and leads you eventually will have the day in which you wake up and your website is demoted. Build links the right way from the beginning.

[crankydave]

Depends on if you're buying "links" or buying "advertising".

If you're buying links that pass PR and can affect the rankings, then as Jaan pointed out, once discovered they can cause you problems.

If you're buying advertising that is going through a redirect or are nofollow'd, then simply watch your traffic and conversions and keep the ones you feel are worth it.

Dave

[chirosche]

Is there anyway to do a private message so I can tell you the site and you can see the links?

[crankydave]

Is there anyway to do a private message so I can tell you the site and you can see the links?

Just click on the user name and then the send private message link.

Dave

[ulrich]

I would keep them, but bBe very picky and careful.
As far as I know, Google needed to post a request on Webmaster central to help them solve the issue about Link building. It shows me that they do not have the technology to find out whether a link was purchased or not.