My general advice is not to buy any links at all, but oh well ... The general rule: the easier it is to get a link (be it by buying or spamming or doing article submissions) the less weight it usually has, because everyone can do it.
If you plan to grow your website as a serious business and not just another shitty affiliate website (that - I think - will be wiped out by the large authoritative sites sooner or later), then guest posts and HARO are currently the safe way to go. Concentrate on reaching out to real relevant websites and offer guest posts with kick ass content. Then get published by larger and better websites by showing them what kind of content you have produced for other sites. Rise in this food chain until forbs will ask you for content
Yes, some of them will ask for money but really good websites usually don't. You actually want links from the sites that are NOT charging anything for guest posts but are just asking for really good content.
This way you will make a lot of contacts in your industry, get your name out and open up many ways for future partnerships.
The problem with paid guest posts and PBNs is that they will link out to anyone who pays. Even if they don't link to sketchy websites yet (adult, casino, male enhancement sites etc.), they might at some point and you definitely don't want a link from any website that links to this kind of stuff (this is also called "links in a bad neighborhood").
But since we all know that people are still buying and selling links (and in some competitive niches you are basically forced to pay for links), here is a list of DON'Ts to at least minimize the risks:
- Start slow for new websites. New sites are rarely getting tons of links right from the start. Start with social profile links (you do have social profiles, right?), followed by the local directories / citations - that are natural links for any business out there. Continue with one or two guest posts per week for a month or so, then send some social signals and maybe increase that to two guest posts per week. Once your site is out of the sandbox slowly increase this number. But I promise you that if you will do one high-quality relevant link per week for a year you will be killing it (you will need new content regularly as well of course).
- Don't waste your time with profile links, blog comments and other nonsense - they won't move the needle. ONE link from a strong relevant site will outperform a hundred of these spammy links. Concentrate on quality content and quality links instead. Once your site will rank well you will get a lot of spammy links anyways, no point to build them yourself
- Don't do niche edits for new sites, this looks unnatural. New websites are usually geting links from newly created pages. Start with that once your site will get traction and traffic. Concentrate on pages that are HIGHLY relevant to your niche and have some links pointing to them.
- Stay away from PBNs - forever. Yes, that are easy links and it looks very tempting but Google has been banning PBNs (and sometimes sites they link to) for years now. No matter how well they claim to hide footprints they always have footprints and Google is getting better and better at spotting them. Usually, it takes me a minute to spot a PBN - mixed content for any niche out there, exact match anchors, one link per article, etc. This is what defines a shitty PBN for me, not the backlink profile (as they are often on expired domains that had legit good links pointing to them). If it takes one minute for me how long do you think it takes for Google's AI?
- If you really want to buy a link / guest post because the site is really relevant and strong - take a very close look at it. Check the traffic, check their backlink profile, check the site's history on archive.org. Search for "site:websitedomainname.com casino" or "site:websitedomainname.com viagra" to see if they link out to anything stupid. If they say "by the way, we have some other sites you could buy a link", that's usually a no - avoid anything that looks like a link-selling business (sites that exist just for selling links). If you have any doubts - it's better to pass on this than to be sorry later.
- Make sure you don't overoptimize your anchor text - if every link will say "steel fishing rods" your page will tank really fast. I always recommend using longtail variations or including the brand name in the anchor. Use exact match anchor only on VERY strong and relevant sites once you have a chance. You still want some exact match anchors, so make them count. If you have 10 links, aim for 1-2 exact match anchors, maybe 5-6 anchors with long tail variations ("check out this steel fishing rods buying guide"), branded anchors ("maozhebong's fishing rods list"), LSI keywords and the rest plain URLs or something like "click here", "website" or just the brand name - Google will know what your site is about from the surrounding context anyway. Brand name and plain links are the safest option, I don't think you can overdo that. And this is where keywords in the URL will help a little bit too. All of this looks natural and mimics how real people link to other stuff.
