SES SJ: Buying & Selling Links

So there’s quite the debate about buying and selling links. What I heard from the experts from this session involved positions from more of a neutral perspective. You could tell that some hands were tied, as perhaps some of the panelists didn’t really like the whole idea of buying links, yet they avoided saying anything that would polarize them on the issue. Eric Ward broke it down like this: Are you buying links because you think the search engines will reward you with higher rankings? Or are you buying links because you want to advertise, without any intent on fooling the search engines? If your answer is to the previous, than you are playing with fire. In my opinion buying links for any reason is a short term strategy that will eventually hurt your site, not help it.