If you are wondering if buying links is bad for search engine optimization its good that you are interested in the affairs of your site rank. A recent video by Matt Cutts suggests that buying links can hurt you and that google can penalize your site for it.

How can someone know that you are buying links or not? That is a good question and doesnt seem to be able to be answered at present. What we can tell you is that google frowns upon it.

Here is a link to the recent video >> Matt Cutts video

If you were however to think of the marketing strategies of google, don’t they pay for advertising links and so forth to promote their business more? But it’s obviously not the same right. Not really it surely is and it shouldn’t matter if people want to pay for a quality link or not. That would mean that Directories that have been around for a while are then frowned upon by google. But then again not really because google gives directories as an example to link building.

In the end everyone must choose what is most important to the value of a site. Great rankings in google or great traffic from links on high traffic sites and everything in between the two.