phpmaven - 3:57 am on Feb 9, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm not suggesting that you could easily sabotage a competitor just by pointing a bunch of spammy links to his site. But the notion that incoming links that are identified by Google as either paid or spammy cannot hurt your rankings or even cause a penalty to your site is just not true any more.

I was always in the camp that thought that the worst that could happen is that those links wouldn't pass "link juice", but that you weren't risking anything more than that. But I'm personally convinced that purchasing text links purely for the SEO benefit is a now a high risk strategy that could seriously hurt your site.

Of course there are those that would argue that this has always been a high risk strategy, and they may have a point. I think what is really telling is that my former SEO has completely changed his business model based on the fact that a few of his clients got hammered because of the obvious purchased text links he was getting for them. He now has gone completely "white hat", whereas previously his MO was that he would buy text links that weren't easily detectable by automated means.

Mark