Fiverr is a neat place to order services, starting at $5.

People offer everything from pictures of their dog for $5 to professional video editing services that could cost $1000 or more.

But is it a good place to buy backlinks? After all, backlinks are what help sites perform better in search engines.

Do not buy backlinks from Fiverr

Over the years, people have emailed me “gigs” to check out (On Fiverr, jobs are called gigs). At first glance, and by reading some seller’s reviews, they look legitimate. The sellers say all the right things. Most ads state that people will write a unique article and put it on their great blog which is even on topic.

After you place the order is when the problems begin. Recently someone showed me 3 gigs they purchased to get links. I reluctantly took a look 48hrs later and 2 of the articles had been removed from the Internet. Article #3 was horribly written and glaringly obvious spam. I googled the article and it was not in search. It turns out the website itself was not found in search results, meaning it has been penalized. My search did reveal the webmaster on a Google Product Forum asking for their penalty to be removed. Ouch.

So, in this case, someone spent $15 for 3 links and ended up with 1 single link from a penalized website.

Fiverr is the brunt of many jokes in the SEO industry, usually used as an insult. (eg: “Your website sucks so bad, did its links come from Fiverr?”)

Buying links just for SEO value is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

You get what you pay for.

Then again, if you poke around Fiverr long enough, you may see links from Forbes for $1,200, which may be a completely different story.

Fiverr is great for many things, just not backlinks.

Len

Leave a Reply