cabbie - 9:37 pm on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Well said Econman.
The fact is, link buying still works and is still needed, especially in competitive serps.
That some websites get burnt by Google's fanaticism about paid links is a price Google are prepared to pay to create fud.
I envisage 2 parallel world wide web entities one day.
One that belongs to google, the other that belongs to anti google, where some webmasters unite and block google altogether.
A google free web, where visitors can only find you by following links;
now that would be interesting.