Today’s dilemma for an online journalist – to buy backlinks or not to buy backlinks?

Google hates paid backlinks – so why are its SERPs a shitshow of sites who have bought backlinks?

One of the frustrations of starting a new website is the dilemma of buying backlinks. Something I have never done before with any of the eight sites I own/have owned.

Supposedly, Google looks down on bought backlinks and will de-index sites who are caught buying them.

The problem is, if you start a new website in 2025, where it once used to take Google days to index it most of its posts, it now takes months. And that’s if they index them at all.

Of course, none of this is fair, as Google prioritizes large, well-known brand name sites over smaller, independent sites. (Google is the worst and most useless search engine in existence, by the way – use DuckDuckGo, if you aren’t already)

Well-known sites, by the way, that have all bought backlinks. With some of them even continuing to do so today. (I’m talking to you Business Insider and the AI-generated garbage you publish and then buy backlinks to link to).

And yes, so much so, Google’s SERPs are still a shitshow of sites that have all bought backlinks. And anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that.

Buying or not buying backlinks?

You know what screws me and my professional progress in life all the time?

The way my parents brought me up.

“Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. Don’t do anything dishonest. Don’t lie. Don’t be nasty or mean. Don’t hurt other“. You get the gist.

In other words, as that famous British poet Philip Larkin once wrote “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

For me then, if I go ahead and buy backlinks for a new site that I have just kicked off over the last month, and which currently has ZERO traction on Google and with ZERO backlinks, the whole time I work on that site I will just be thinking to myself I am getting ahead due to paying for backlinks the content I write didn’t earn.

Will that damage my ability to get the site ranking quickly? Obviously.

After all, I am competing against sites that have bought hundreds, sometimes thousands of backlinks.

But, Google keeps ramming down everyone’s throats the notion that “Content is king” and, sadly with me and my morals, that’s the only thing I can stick to.

Are they lying to us? Probably.

Do I want my career to be negatively affected by the inability to get my new site to rank? Of course not.

But, just because a huge percentage of people who own successful websites have already gone the fraud route (and let’s face it, that’s what it is), does that mean I should as well?

The moral of today then — to buy backlinks or not to buy backlinks?

I think you probably already know what my decision will be.

Off then to write more “quality content”. We’ll see how it pans out.