Purchasing Links…Good or Bad?

Will purchasing links hurt your reputation? Will it drive down your rankings? Is it considered black-hat marketing?
In reality, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH PURCHASHING LINKS AS LONG AS THEY ARE RELATED TO YOUR SITES CONTENT.
If you’ve purchased a link on a site, and getting traffic from it, whats the harm??? If you’re purchasing links for [...]

Will purchasing links hurt your reputation? Will it drive down your rankings? Is it considered black-hat marketing?
In reality, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH PURCHASHING LINKS AS LONG AS THEY ARE RELATED TO YOUR SITES CONTENT.
If you’ve purchased a link on a site, and getting traffic from it, whats the harm??? If you’re purchasing links for the sole reason of raising your rankings, your rankings may be negatively affected. For example, let’s say you own a car site, but you’re advertising on a vacuum site with a PR of 7. A search engine can look at that and realize that you’re advertising on a site with unrelated content. Common sense would tell you that your rankings will be negatively affected. This shows an attempt to “hack” the engines. This is just a theory of course. On the other hand, we’ve seen sites that show a SHORT TERM ranking increase, but the keyword is SHORT TERM.

It’s a good idea to set a budget of say $100 / month (depending on your budget size) and purchase links from various websites. You can track (through your stats software) which referrers are sending converting customers. If you notice that a referrer is sending bouncing customers, discountinue your advertising from that site and move it somewhere else. It should typically take 3-7 days to find out if a link will convert. The budget is totally up to you.