Paid Links – The Best Way To Rank In The Top 10

Now you might be double taking at the title because most of you who read this blog know I am not in favor of paid links. Now with that being said, why the hell am I talking about them? Well for the past couple of months I’ve been taking on a lot of clients which involves me to research their competitors backlink profiles. I’ve also taken on a few clients who were competing for some very dominated keywords, and from what I’ve learned is that paid links are still king.

Over the past week I’ve been working in a niche for a client that is tough to break into and we’re starting down a long road of link building. I won’t name the niche at all out of respect for my client, and I don’t want to out anyone for paid links because that’s not my agenda here. From what I have seen it is safe to say Google is not able to keep up at all with paid links, and perhaps they are only targeting sites that are listed in paid link networks. Besides the obvious it seems the best way is to go underground and contact these sites one on one.

From what I can tell, within some of these competitive niches the sites buying links usually are very in quality in regards to content and design. So I’ll admit the sites, even though paying for hundreds of links, should most likely still be ranking where they are. So will these sites eventually get the ban hammer dropped upon them? I’m starting to think most likely not, but I’m going to be keeping my eye on a few sites to see within the next year what happens. I’m also wondering if these sites were buying links years ago and because they’re all decently old, are they getting a get out of jail free pass?

I took a good amount of time looking at the advertising pages that some of the link sellers had open to the public. Most of them did not seem to fear the big G at all and openly set prices to text links. On top of that a lot of these sites had a solid PageRank of 5-7, and again it brings me back to wondering just how solid an old domain can be. So with all that being said, what are your thoughts on paid links(sorry to beat a dead horse, but she’s still breathing a little)?