I am constantly amazed at the people who make up our industry. Time and time again I will read something “out there” and walk away shaking my head in total disbelief. This is yet again one of those times.

Two “whitehats” have written two different articles on link buying. One of them is David Wallace, a whitehat SEO who moderates at http://www.highrankings.com/forum. Another is Rand Fishkin; a SEO consultant that many may know about.

First; David wrote this article about one month ago I guess:

http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2007/08/link-seller-caveats.html

Rand wrote this article today;

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-art-of-buying-links-under-the-radar

The underlaying theme in both of them is the idea that buying a link from a website is no different than submitting your site to the Yahoo Directory and paying for the “review”. This cannot be any further from the truth. First off; a directory is very different from a regular website. Yahoo is different than other directories because Google actually states that sites should get into the Yahoo directory. That’s a big recommendation. A Yahoo editor reviews and screens your submission before it’s included as well.

How can buying a link from joesmoe website be the same as submitting your site to Yahoo for a “review” to be included in their directory? I have no idea.

The other similar traits of the two articles is the fact they both seem to want to find loopholes and tricks in the ability of Google to detect “paid links”. Why is that anyway? If a site wanted to buy a link from another site, then buy the link please. Google does not have to count that link, right? Go ahead and buy it. Why do you care if Google can detect that link or not? You are buying that link for the great visitors you will be getting, right? It shouldn’t make a difference if the site is using a nofollow tag or is using a javascript link either.

I’m really not getting the kind of new mentality of our industry that it’s okay to see what kind of SERP manipulation you can obtain from buying links. I hope someone can help me understand this a bit better. If you are seeking to buy a link from a website, no need to know or care how that site is implementing your link. You should be buying it for the related content the site has to your site, so the visitors on the site might be visitors you want to find your site as well. Search engines should not be in this equation at all. If they are, and you find yourself doing as David and Rand do; IE: searching for ways to trick Google, etc, then you are truly not a whitehat SEO at all.

The funny thing is; even if you buy that link and the site does not use a nofollow tag, and it’s even a very direct link to your site, and Google does not detect it, why would you think that Google is going to “count” the link you bought anyway? What if one week later and Google does detect that link? You received one week of Google juice for it, so was it worth it? How about the tedius time involved in doing everything that Rand and David tell you to do when buying links? I can think of many more important things to be doing than searching around looking for ways to cheat Google.

Google wants an incoming link to be a VOTE from the site to your site. Anytime you are buying a link with the understanding that the site is going to be showing your “ad” on their site, that link cannot be a “vote” for your site. Why the heck are otherwise smart people thinking that it’s a good thing to go out looking for “undetectable” links?

I’m really not getting it.

Read what Google has to say on the buying of links here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

We launched the new site in “BETA” form. We certainly know it has bugs in it and are working real hard to fix things. Give me any thoughts you have or any suggestions you may have.