It really couldn’t be any clearer and it really has been clear for a long time…LOL. Don’t buy paid links for the purpose of ranking highly in Google. And for that matter, don’t sell links either. I really don’t get why this is such a big surprise for most Webmasters. It’s pretty clear that ever since Page Rank has become the most powerful force in the SEO universe (and by that I mean the emergence of Google so please don’t start the “is Page Rank important?” debate, we will save that for a later time) that a link has been equivalent to a vote in the Google system. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Google doesn’t want the people with the most money or the people who can best reverse engineer their search results to be able to manipulate their index. If Google wants their search results to be a true reflection of what people think is the best resource for a particular topic, then it makes perfect sense for them to not want to include paid links into that ranking equation. And the article above certainly illustrates that they have been clear about that for a long time. So now that their systems are doing a better job of enforcing those principles, why are so many people upset? Well obviously because the old tricks that used to work don’t work anymore..lol. I am truly sympathetic to anyone that unjustly suffers because of the unintended side effects which might be occurring because of Google’s new filters. Anytime Google penalizes a group of sites, there are bound to be a couple inadvertent problems. With an index that big, how could there not be. But for the most part, there are a lot of people who are upset because they can’t buy their way to listings anymore and now they have to get more creative with the way they present their content, market their site and promote viral linking. Anyway, I think it is obvious how I feel about the subject which is why none of my clients ever buy links for the purpose of SEO results. (more…)

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