Although buying links for the purposes of manipulating search engine rankings is rightly frowned upon by Google, the search engine company has explicitly recognised that the buying and selling of links for advertising purposes is a recognised part of the economy of the internet.
You can read what Google says about paid links here.
If You Buy A Link
If you’re going to buy a link, there are a few things that you need to bear in mind. As we’ve said, there are some types of paid links that are acceptable. But even an “acceptable” paid link needs to meet certain criteria to make sure that it’s useful.
A link that gets posted on 5,000 completely irrelevant websites will, in the long run, probably do you more harm than good. So it’s always better to buy one good link from one good source, than to buy many links, especially if they’re all coming from the same place. Something else to remember is that if you’re buying paid advertising in the form of banners, it’s often best to make sure that the banner is a nofollow link, unless you have control over where it is appearing.
Factors To Consider When Buying A Link
* Do the pages get cached every few days?
* How much of the site is indexed?
* Is there flexibility in terms of categories and anchor text?
* How much do they charge? (Low prices probably mean low quality links.)
* How well is the site marketed, and what other links do they carry?
* How well is the page optimised? (Good optimisation means more traffic.)
Things To Avoid
* Links from multiple directories hosted on the same IP address.
* Multiple directories with the same class C IP address.
* Interlinked directories with questionable owners.
* Identical directories with different domain names.
* Directories with Google penalties.
Click the link for a list factors which affect Google penalties for directories.
The Best Inbound Links
As we’ve mentioned in the past, inbound links are one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. This is largely because search engines like Google weigh link analysis so heavily, when it comes to determining your position on the search engine results page.
As a result, they tend to pay a lot of attention to the quality of the links. In the end, however legitimate your paid links may be, nothing beats good quality, relevant organic links that you’ve gotten by virtue of your content, or your involvement in the online community.