fatinfo.com

Well, not exactly black hat SEO. But buying thousands of dollars worth of links certainly feels like black hat SEO. The thinking goes if you are an advertiser spending anywhere from 20k-30k each month on AdWords or any type of PPC, then you need to consider taking 10-20% of that budget and shift it over to SEO which includes on-page optimization and paid targeted anchor text links. The last couple of days I found it exciting to locate multi-billion dollar cooperations buying links after links on every major million dollar online publication.

I can safely assume these publications make up 30% of their site revenue offering these rich text anchor links to advertisers who are willing to pay a price. This practice of buying links for natural search manipulation is amazing simply because a thousand dollars will only get five good links for a month.

Then there was another irony, the very well known publication freely displayed adsense on the same page. Now if you were to think this through, if Google was really out to penalize or ban companies who deal with the semi-black SEO practice of buying and selling links - the Google AdSense / content network would crumble. They only pick on a few small publisher to scare off the lemmings who are easily swayed.