Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tool, the TouchGraph Google Browser

You can use this free Java application to explore the connections between related websites and quickly find relations that were not obvious before.

Here is an example:

Touchgraph Results for Keyword "link building"

You can see the TouchGraph results for the keyword “link building”, which happens to be one of the keywords that I want to rank for, and which happens to have a lot of competition. The Touch Graph application revealed to me that several of the results that appear on page 1 in Google have a link from a certain page on searchenginewatch.com.

I quickly headed over to that page and left a comment there. Bingo, one step forward regard my link building campaign.

photo credit: spaceamoeba

The only thing true about is that there might be a handful of people searching for SEO tricks and trying to somehow gain a competitive advantage. With the search engines it’s like real life: If you play it honest and straight, it usually works best.

Now, the title the articles mentioned above is rather strange, but the content is actually very good:

This week we will learn how to increase your inbound links number without paying for any campaigns. For the ones who don’t know Inbound links are links form high rated web sites/domains that link to yours. And in case someone doesn’t know what does SEO stand for, it’s Search Engine Optimization

So, what you need to do is very simple thing, if you are a blogger – have a blog like me, you probably have bunch of friends with their own blogs sharing similar subjects, find their top rated articles (most often they are most commented ones) by searching on Google for Sitelinks … and ask them to put one paragraph for example at the end of those articles.

This was as I mentiond via stylizedweb.com. And this method works. It’s rather time consuming, but you will get related links from pages that are already ranking for your keywords.

Often it is much easier to buy.edu backlinks or to order link building services.