Here is another fun poll Lily Ray posted on Twitter, asking if you or your company have bought links in the past five years. The results are literally 50/50. I retweeted it to help get more of a response last week and with over 1,000 responses, it is pretty funny to see SEOs split down the middle.

The question asked was “Anonymous survey: have you (or your company) purchased backlinks – of ANY quality – for your own site, or any of your clients’ sites, at any point in the past ~5 years?” There were 1,108 votes on the poll and the results were 50% said yes and 50% said no.

Here is the tweet:

Does this surprise you? If I asked this five-years ago, I bet it would be closer to 75% yes and 25% no. But today, espesially with the taboo Google has put on links and espesially buying links, many SEOs stay way from it in the literal sense.

Yes, buying links that are not nofollowed are against Google’s guidelines – so don’t do it.

Here are some of the responses to the question because like anything in SEO, the answer is never black and white or yes or no. 🙂

There is a lot more but here are just some of the responses to the original poll.

Forum discussion at Twitter.