The Right and Wrong Way to Use Paid Links
Your link building strategy is a moving target. Google is always adding new wrinkles to its black box of search ranking algorithms. Every other search engine is trying to be more like Google. In the good old days, before anyone figured out how to use the internet to make money, climbing atop the rankings was pretty simple. Keyword stuffing your ‘meta’ tags, and buying up low quality links or text linked ads from every corner of the internet ghetto was often enough to get you to Google’s number one spot.
Since then, these two strategies have taken different courses. The use of meta-tags for SEO purposes has been completely discontinued. Their relevance is zero. Paid links have ridden the wave of public opinion. At first everyone was using them. Then Google caught on, and they were heavily penalized. Now there is a lull in antagonism towards them, mostly because they’re not used too much anymore.
Should they be used anymore? The answer is it depends. Every search engine caught on long ago that spammy link farms were not all that useful. You know, those offers that you see for 10,000 links for $10? There’s no better way to flag yourself as an internet troll and send a message to Google that says ‘Yes!! I’m illegitimate!!’ The easy targets are easy to punish. The problem for the search engines has become that it’s impossible to accurately monitor all internet activity.
Specifically, it is difficult to discern paid from unpaid links. SEO expert Rand Fishkin has a very good discussion of the issue on his blog. (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-selling-text-link-ads). The moral issues behind buying text links is a grey one, and mostly depends on the individual buying or selling the links. If you follow the white hat practice of only getting links from relevant sites for relevant content, you should be fine, whether the links are paid for or not.
But even if your methods are honest and true, you still run the potential of a search ranking penalty. To reduce this risk, text link brokers are usually a good idea. The folks at Text Link Brokers (textlinkbrokers.com), and Text-Link-Ads (text-link-ads.com) have good reputations, will buy text link ads for you, and provide the additional benefit of covering up your tracks so search engines will not be privy to your actions.
Buying text link ads is a niche strategy, and by itself has limited usefulness. It should be used in conjunction with other methods. But if you have more money than time, and clearly defined business goals for your website, the ROI on such a practice is likely to be high.