If your tempted to buy paid links to your site, DON’T!

Google has clearly spelled it out:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.”

Google even requests people report the practice.

“Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

The problems accordingto Google is:

“Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites.’

There are ways around the problem that Google does not consider search engine manipulation.

“Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such” states Google.

This can be done by

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute
  
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Using the rel="nofollow" attribute shows that the paid link is for advertising purposes only and Google considers that you do not want to manipulate your website rankings.

"Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating."

Good quality links that point to your website will be from related websites that contain the keywords that you are seeking high ranking with.

A very useful free resource that will help you get inbound links and up your page ranking is IBP. Its free – although they do hope you will upgrade to their guaranteed top ten web ranking service.

I have found it extremely useful for my commercial sites.