Legitimate benefits
- Reach a relevant audience
- Build relationships with publishers and peers
- Earn referral visits
- Demonstrate expertise through useful content
- Create brand discovery outside your own site
The policy line
Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, including money exchanged for posts containing links. They also mention optimized anchor text in distributed guest posts as an example of problematic behavior.
Paid placements can exist
Google also says buying and selling links is a normal part of the web economy for advertising and sponsorship when those links are appropriately qualified. Its guidance prefers rel="sponsored", with nofollow still acceptable.
A safer evaluation question
Would you still value the publication, article and audience if the link did not pass ranking credit? That question helps separate editorial value from a ranking-only transaction.
Primary references
Primary references