Many SEOs To Buy Links In 2022 Despite Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Tim Soulo from ahrefs posted a Twitter poll asking will you pay money to get links in 2022? Sadly, someone spammed the poll but I recreated it and it clearly shows that many, almost half of SEOs, are planning on buying and paying for links in 2022.

Here is the recreated poll:

Will you pay money to get links in 2022?

(Please be honest)

Original poll via @timsoulo but someone spammed the poll and ruined the results

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) January 6, 2022

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With 770 results, if you remove the see results option, you see about 53% say they will not pay for links in 2022 but 47% said they will pay for links in 2022.

This is despite Google having a specific guideline against paid links saying “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Also, in 2017, Gary Illyes from Google said that buying links is like throwing money out of the window.

Does this surprise you at all?

Forum discussion at Twitter.