This includes paying sponsorship fees for guest posts, as well as gifting products or sample cell phone number in philippines services in exchange for a link.
If a link is paid for, it means it is not placed editorially.
But while it’s a no-no from an SEO perspective, if you’re using sponsored content for reasons other than link building (to leverage someone’s audience and gain referral traffic, for example), be sure to add the rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attributes for full transparency and to prevent links from being identified as unnatural.
Links that use exact match (keyword-rich) anchor text are often toxic, largely regardless of the source.
Just think of it this way...
Most people don't naturally link to an online shoe store using "buy cheap shoes" anchor text.
They are much more likely to link to you using your brand or domain.
If there is an overuse of keyword-heavy anchor text , you may be paying for links or they may not be editorially placed.
If you are influencing anchor text which is usually the exact match to the keywords a page is trying to rank for, the links are unnatural.
Do you see the link to "web audits" in the example below?
That's an exact match anchor text.
Toxic Backlinks - Exact Match Anchor Text
PBN or link networks
A PBN is a Black Hat SEO link building tactic that involves building and maintaining a collection of sites that are used for the primary purpose of driving links to other sites and are typically developed from expired domains that are repurposed.
Many Black Hat SEOs argued that Google would never discover a truly private blog network.
However, many of them are easy to spot by experienced SEOs and therefore also by Google, even though they may appear natural at first glance to an everyday web user.
Using PBNs to build links results in unnatural links, and Google has for years been actively seeking to shut down such networks, with high-profile instances dating back to 2014 .
Google is finally able to discover virtually any PBN, and the penalties imposed can often be severe.
As Nathan Gotch comments on GotchSEO: