Question about purchasing "white hat" links

I have an over 12 year old website that I've been growing into a product-selling business. After Panda and Penguin, my online retail business is down to bones and barely staying open. This is my only website because I'm just plainly considered an e-commerce merchant.

I understand that buying links is not exactly white hat (according to Google, unless you are paying Google for temporary links through Adwords).

There are a couple of threads that are tagged as "White Hat" at the Marketplace for Link Building. I'm guessing that it would be in terms of adding the links to your site as "cleanly" as possible to make it look natural and not flagged.

I understand that there are always risks involved, with almost anything, especially when dealing with Google.

The question is, how much of a risk would it be to purchase one of these link packages, for your main website that has been generally 80-90% white-hat. Would you suggest this option to a paying client?

Thank you!

Your safest bet is to make your own link network if you're serious enough about SEO. I know it takes a lot more time than just buying links, but you can buy your links now, and then switch over to your own network of high PR bought domains and such. Also, a network is fairly safe if it isn't too big.

There is no such thing as "buying" white hat links - according to G......

What I mean, is ANYTHING considered white hat today, could be penalized by G tomorrow. You are best off manually making "contributions" to other related sites with backlinks.

White hat basically means that you arent buying links. You are buying services such as press releases, guest posting,etc.
So in a way you are buying links but you are not directly doing so, the links just come in as a s result.
On the other hand buying links would mean getting footer,sidebar links,etc.

Adam718 said:

Your safest bet is to make your own link network if you're serious enough about SEO. I know it takes a lot more time than just buying links, but you can buy your links now, and then switch over to your own network of high PR bought domains and such. Also, a network is fairly safe if it isn't too big.

Click to expand...

I think this is the route I will take for the long-haul.

I agree that Google is just changing the rules to force merchants to pay Adwords to play.

It's pretty evident, when recently they imposed the nofollow rules for product reviewers. This would be the same for companies providing print magazines free products for reviews, but not get mentioned.

There's no such thing as paying for White Hat links. By definition any time you do anything to manipulate rankings it's not white hat. Poster above is right though, safest bet is to build your own network.

White hat links by the sellers definition is referring to manually created links instead of using software with spun content.

They links are higher quality than automated completely black hat links

I have websites that are pretty much completely white hat as well, the only link building I've done is through legitimate guest posts and some occasional web 2.0s where I wrote completely unique and useful content on my own. Very time consuming but the results have been nice.

I'm considering buying links myself though, and I've had the same concerns about trying to keep my site white hat in the process. But it doesn't seem like it's possible because of what everyone else said. G just doesn't want people buying links, whether they are sidebar or footer links or if you're buying web 2.0s or whatever, no matter what it's just not white hat anymore.

I wouldn't consider it completely black hat either though. Maybe grey hat is the right term for it.

Purchasing links is not 'Whitehat'. It is a mix of both whitehat and blackhat. Lets call it grey hat. The seller uses some of each, to achieve the wanted effect.

Paid white links is kind of an oxymoron.

I would only recommend paid links depending on the current status of the site and budget. If you don't have much traffic currently then there isn't much you can lose. I always let clients know that the risk is that the links do not pass any value.

I use paid links all the time, and software generated spam straight to my money sites. The ONLY time I've got in trouble was when I disrespected link velocity (b/c of a mistake I made with the settings). Respect anchor text diversity and link velocity and you should be fine.