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I'm not sure whether it's my imagination or not but I'm beginning to think that I'm seeing more and more people talking openly about buying links and that really resonates with me because, at the moment, Steve and I have been thinking about buying a link or two.

There was a time when link buying was seen as a perfectly legitimate business. You bought links to bring in traffic and you bought links to boost your ranking in the search engines and webmasters were happy. The link buyers got what they paid for and those who were lucky enough to have links worth buying were happy too because they got money in exchange for their hard work.

It was a win/win situation for just about everyone ... everyone that is except Google. Of course Google was always going to hate the idea of buying and selling links because one of the main foundations of the Google algorithm is the number of inbound links that a site has. Because the Google boys decided that inbound links were an indication of the true worth of a site the idea of buying and selling links was something they couldn't handle.

Google also had another problem with buying and selling links ... they wanted to get in on the action and they couldn't corner the market while there was so much competition. Now there's no quicker way to beat the competition than to crush it completely and Google had the perfect way to do just that.

They announced that buying and selling links was illegal ... obviously it wasn't because no country has ever enacted a law that made the buying and selling of links illegal but that was just a technicality as far as Google was concerned. If you tell enough people enough times that something is illegal they will begin to believe you ... at least for a while.

Google also understood that they could only fool a percentage of webmasters into believing that link buying or selling was illegal so they had to find some other way to bring an end to the trade in links.

The solution was perhaps even easier than trying to convince people that the trade in links was illegal. All Google had to do was make a change to their webmaster guidelines and then toss a few sites that Google caught buying or selling links out of the directory for non-compliance. News spreads fast in our industry and it didn't take much all but destroy the trade in links.

Once Google had link buying and selling under control it didn't take much effort to keep a lid on it. All they had to do was reinforce the idea that they had sown that link buyers or sellers were somehow amoral crooks who would take your money and destroy your business and go on tossing sites out of Google's listing whenever they could find one that was not complying with Google's guidelines.

Unfortunately for Google their ability to identify paid links has not been all that good and there's an added problem here for Google. The idea of giving a site the tick of approval and saying that it has the authority and the information you need for the term you're searching for mostly because it has a gazillion links pointing to it is wrong.

The whole link popularity concept as a measure of worth is based on bullshit. It may have been a valid measure of the worth of a site in years gone by but not these days. There are some incredibly focused and relevant sites that provide important information that have hardly any links pointing to them and so they miss out on a good ranking because of the rubbish that Google's algorithm looks for.

So more and more webmasters are waking up to reality ... link buying and selling may be against Google's webmaster guidelines but if you want to get people to see your message then you had better be prepared to seriously consider buying a few inbound links while you explore other ways to build up you link profile.

Of course there is a danger involved here and you shouldn't get into the link buying game unless you are prepared to run the risk of having Google catch you and toss you out of their listings. That can have a devastating impact on your website but sometimes ... when the alternative is pretty much the same ... buying a few links is definitely worth thinking about.

And lots of people are thinking about it and there is still quite a trade in link buying and there are many ethical people involved in it despite what Google would have you believe so do your homework and look at your options ... but always remember the risks.