Does anyone fear a link buying apocolypse?

Even legit brands and companies who use white hat companies are probably (unknowingly) acquiring links via paid methods. But it takes 2 to tango. A legit brand using a legit white hat SEO company may have acquired a featured article on Inc. mag's website with a strong link back to their website, for the cool fee of $750 (the current rate for inc links). And we've seen this with other big sites like huffo (since diluted), Entrepreneur, Mashable, and lately, somewhat alarmingly, Reuters.

My question is what are the risks here, and is anyone taking any futurerpoof precautions?

I've noticed that BHW users blur the lines quite a bit b/w black and white. In the BHW community, PBN links are considered black hat, and a paid link on Entrepreneur is considered white hat! This is not true. It simply means that the link from Entrepreneur is either stronger or more futureproof than the PBN link(s). But buying these links is still black hat.

And I wonder if there will be a day of reckoning in form of penalties or a 'black book' style list of all the SEO agencies or even client sites that have acquired paid links. (Publications like Entrepreneur might get dinged too but i'm not really worried about that aspect).

Curious what others here think about this topic of 'safe and strong (paid) white hat links'.

It's definitely coming, most of them use similar author profiles. It's harder to implement if the company doesn't openly talk about what company they are working for tho

Neil patel's got caught for his bc they publically talk about it, but if you look through a couple big SEOs website

a few obvious ones will pop up
i.e paid .edu student/community links
sidebar links etc

v. said:

It's definitely coming, most of them use similar author profiles. It's harder to implement if the company doesn't openly talk about what company they are working for tho

Click to expand...

I agree which is why i think manual outreach to bloggers beats the big 'white hat' links from huge websites. I can stretch $800 much further than just dumping it onto a Reuters link, the latter of which feels like it might be removed at any given notice.

Huffpo and Tech.co both removed huge swaths of guest posts (and links) about 2 years ago, probably bc they were being so thoroughly abused in link marketplaces. Just a matter of time before it happens to the other big fish. I think Forbes and Entrepreneur are up next

The thing, in my opinion, is that the white is never enough white since there somebody that doesn't like the white.

So corruption exists in all corners of the world.

great article interesting points

If the article in which backlink is given to domain is valuable ... I don't think Google gives 2 fucks

I've always wondered what happens with these huge directory listing sites.. does google skip it because its a directory listing ?

Links coming from those kind of sources are not whitehat, because you pay for them.
However, it's going to be harder to spot which links are paid and which aren't on those kind of websites as they all look similar. On the other hand, PBN's are way easier to spot, so they tend to be more Blackhat.

Again, any type of link buying is against Google's TOS and forbidden.
But, if they can't spot what's paid and what isn't, then you can call it whitehat.