Buying Links for SEO
TweetA popular practice for many years was the purchasing of text links on blogs for the purposes of increasing your rankings in the search engines. There were a lot of sites who did nothing more than buy links and then watch their rankings rise with little to no effort on their part, but the times they are a changing. Google has spent a lot of time and money into factoring paid links into their algorithms and I feel like they have done a great job of minimizing the effects of paid links. There are still sites out there that are having a lot of success doing it, but my feeling is that in the long run these sites are going to lose their ranking benefits from the links they purchased. You have to weight the cost and benefit of purchasing text links, but I personally don't want to spend a bunch of money on a practice that the search engines are actively discouraging and trying to discount.
Why do Search Engines Hate Paid Links?
Search engines want their results to be as efficient and as accurate as possible. This means that users are able to easily find what they are looking for and anyone trying to game their system is evil in their opinion. Paid links can disrupt the search results so by eliminating the practice Google thinks they are making their results more accurate. It all started with Google penalizing sites that sell paid links, and even some that purchase the links. By harming sites that sell links it caused many webmasters to play it on the safe side and to stop selling links on their site.
Write Guest Posts for Links
Instead of buying straight links on a blogroll or in the sidebar how about writing a guest post with a few links to your site instead? I have found that this is a lot more valuable way for a site to still get value out of "buying links." With the guest posts you are at least adding some value to the internet as a whole so I don't think Google has as big of a problem with it. What you don't want to do is write a guest post about sports on a site that focuses on women's shoes. Only write guest posts for sites that are within the same niche, that way you can get some click through traffic to go along with passing page rank to your site.
Get Your Site Reviewed
If you don't want to write a guest post you can also have a relevant site write a review of your site. With this method you pay a slightly higher fee, since you aren't doing the work, and the blog owner will write a post explaining why he likes or doesn't like what you have to offer. Again, make sure that the site you are getting a review from is relevant to yours, so that way you get both click through traffic and the passing of page rank.
What are you opinions of buying links for SEO purposes? Let us know in the comments.