Good question. But why exactly are you asking it? Would you like to know whether this is a good practice or not, or maybe you’d like to know whether this technique will get site banned or help increase your rankings in the search engines? Is it a question of link popularity or you just want more targeted traffic?

You see, when people dig into this topic, they do it mostly for a higher PR – PageRank. Website owners fight for #1 placements and high PR and they use all possible, ethical and less ethical means. As eWritings, and yours truly, don’t support or encourage unethical methods, I am not even going to cover (in this post) such techniques.

Now back to our question: should you buy links?

First let me underline one very important aspect. You don’t “buy” links, but “rent” links. There is no such thing like “lifetime link placements”. Nothing lasts forever and the Web is a constantly evolving entity. So you “rent” a link for a limited or unlimited period of time.

Is this a good thing? Maybe. Buying links or banner space on popular websites is pure advertising. And advertising is good. Are the search engines going to penalize your site for buying links? No quite. No search engine will penalize a site for having inbound links. They will penalize a site for having outbound links pointing to “bad neighbors”. So if buying text links, banner space or other advertising means are planned in your website marketing strategy, just do it. But… yes, there is a “but”!

If your site’s ranking count solely on link popularity and for this purpose you use solely paid linking strategies, your rankings might (as a matter of fact will is the word) drop, while you will still have the traffic from the sites on which you advertise. Why? To put it simple, there are too many websites that use the buying links strategy to artificially inflate link popularity. The search engines already know that and while they do not technically penalize the webmasters for advertising their websites, they don’t give them any link popularity. Why? Because search engines (or should we just say “Google”?) place the emphasis on natural techniques.

There is already rumor in forums about “dropped rankings in spite of good linking”. And webmasters already complain that their “buying links” strategies didn’t work out as expected. Google doesn’t look solely to links any longer. As a matter of fact, it really ignores many links that Yahoo and MSN list. The latent search indexing shows that the Giant makes efforts towards natural search results. And buying links as an artificial method of boosting PR is a technique that simply doesn’t work so well nowadays. The rankings you achieve with such a campaign today might vanish next month or next year… or tomorrow. And that’s just because this living organism, the Web, is really evolving.

You might be interested to read:

How to Measure SEO Success

SEO for Beginners Part II (with more details on linking strategies)