Link Schemes to Avoid

Almost everyone building a first website eventually gets the offer: hundreds of backlinks, fast, for very little money. This page is about why that offer exists, what Google's rules actually say, and how to recognise the same thing when it is dressed up as something respectable.

What counts as a link scheme

Google's spam policies define a link scheme as any attempt to manipulate rankings by creating links that were not freely given. The test is not the technique — it is whether a person chose to link to you on the merits.

The policies name specific practices. The clear-cut ones:

• Buying or selling links that pass ranking credit — including paying with free products or services rather than money.
• Excessive link exchanges — "link to me and I'll link to you" arranged systematically.
• Automated link building — software that creates links across forums, comments and directories.
• Low-quality directory and bookmark submissions that exist only to host links.
• Hidden links, or links in text nobody can see.

And the ones that catch honest people out, because they look like normal marketing:

• Large-scale guest posting where the article exists to carry a keyword-rich link.
• Paid or sponsored content whose links are not marked.
• Widgets and templates that embed a link back to you on every site that uses them.
• Press releases distributed at scale with optimised anchor text.

Why it is a bad trade even when it works

The economics are worth understanding, because "everyone does it" is the usual argument for it.

Google's systems are built specifically to find these patterns, and the common outcome is not a dramatic penalty but silence: the links are identified and simply do not count. You paid for nothing. That is the good case.

The bad case is a manual action — a human reviewer at Google flagging your site, which shows up in Search Console and can remove you from results. Recovering means finding and removing the links, disavowing what you cannot remove, and submitting a reconsideration request. It takes far longer than the ranking took to lose, and there is no appeal to speed it up.

There is a third cost people forget: you do not own the links. The seller can remove them the day you stop paying, so any ranking you rented disappears with them.

What to do instead

• Mark commercial links honestly. Use rel="sponsored" for anything paid, and rel="ugc" for user-generated content like comments. Marking a paid link correctly is completely allowed — hiding it is what breaks the rules.
• Ask one question about any link opportunity: would this person link to me if Google did not exist? If not, it is a scheme regardless of what it is called.
• Check Search Console for manual actions. It is a specific report, and it is empty for the vast majority of sites.
• Leave spam links pointing at you alone. Google generally ignores them, and says most sites never need the disavow tool.
• Write guest posts where you would want the readers, not where you want the link.

Common mistakes

Assuming an agency's links are safe because you paid an agency. The obligation is on your site. "Our SEO company did it" is not a defence, and it is a very common way for a site to acquire a penalty.

Reading "nofollow" as an insult. A nofollowed link from a publication people actually read still sends real visitors, which was the point.

Disavowing aggressively. The disavow tool is a way to shoot yourself in the foot: disavow good links by mistake and you remove signals that were helping you. Google's own advice is that most sites should not use it.

Sources: Google's spam policies and Google Search Essentials.