Page 3 - General Advice Needed

Under "Make sure that other sites link to yours"

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

So there you have it, link buying is not natural, so there is 100% no point in doing it.

Also Google do not say the will ban you, but they don't say they won't / can't.

So either we are both wrong, or both right.

They set the guidelines for ranking in Google, if you choose not to follow them, Google have there own free right to not have you listed in their rankings.
So why run the risk of trying to be deceptive towards Google with paid, un-natural links?

Actually, not once did I say that buying links was good, in fact, fairly certain I specifically said it wasn't. I said it was a tactic that could produce short term results if you wanted short term results.

You said that buying links would get you banned from google. I said you were wrong, which you are. I believe that is what we were originally arguing about

But are you Google?

What's your source of saying that Google WILL NOT choose to ban someone who violates their web master guidelines.

I provided mine saying they neither.

Nothing on Google says "buy links, we will just ignore them"
Nothing on Google says "buy links, we will just ban you"

So while your having a paddy saying I'm wrong, you haven't post anything to prove you right.

"Arguing on the internet is like winning the s...."

A quote from Matt Cutt's Blog on the subject:



Game, set and match...

Jeez FH... with all the posts you've made on here you ought to have learned by now that PR is NOT a product of SEO, just your incoming links... (you can get incoming links without knowing anything about SEO)
What are the odds that www.insurance.co.uk is available?



I looked throught this thread and don't see anybody saying "buying links is good"!
With that said, it IS good - for traffic, it's just not advisable to buy links for SEO purposes.
Matt Cutts said:
So they won't "penalise" but can remove the ability for that site to pass on PR and Trust...
What are the odds that the buyer will get penalized? I'd say None. Because it would be too easy to use the loophole to hurt competition and because buying links isn't against anybody's law, Matt/Google acknowledge that buying links for traffic is legitimate but recommend that the seller tags the link "nofollow"... The buyer isn't responsible for the seller's site code, so penalising him would be unjust.
If however you were to buy links from multiple (unrelated) sources, you might well attract some negative attention from Google.

Okay I'll do a Frenchy.

All I know is we got our site in strong positions for a-lot of keywords, no mass link buying, did start off with directories and paid directories but that ended last year when the talk of they offer no value.
Someone posted here and content is king, I would agree on that comment.
And I have still not seen a source where Google states.

"You buy links, you won't get banned."

Until They do, I recommend no-one do it.

And Glenn to answer your original question as you can see from the last load of posts, Link buying weather it gets you in trouble or not, is ignored by Google, so why waste the money.

Just don't copy paste others content, don't even reword it slightly, come up with your own unique stuff, see what rewards you can bring.