Questions about links

Buy a link or thousands of it?

[Vietnamese robot]

Hello Everyone,
Finally I found this real webmaster forum. So helpful with heaps of information.
I have some questions, please advise me if those questions been posted ( I have not gone though this site yet after few hours so I may miss out something )
My questions are : is it worth to buy backlinks from link broker? Number of links more important than 1 quality link? buy 1 or thousand of it?
Why my site still has good ranking in MSN or even Yahoo without a link?
Another site of mine has 3000 link has linked to my site 4 months ago but google and alexa said 0. No link at all?
Thank you so much for your input and looking forward to get your help. I really need links and just waiting for your advice before buying some links from somewhere ( I am so tired with spending hours to looking for links...and get lacks of information )
Best to all of you.

[otech]

1 quality link is probably all the purchased ones are worth now google (as mentioned on matt cutts blog) are specifically going after paid links.

They can identify and devalue them pretty easily.

Links are definately still of value, and you dont really need that many - they just need to be from sites that are hardest to get them from!

gov, edu sites are gold if you can convince them to link to you.

[jchampliaud]

gov, edu sites are gold if you can convince them to link to you.

Would the edu sites happen to include student and/or professor web pages? I have a few of those but didn't know they where of great value.

[anton23]

Look if the pages are indexed.
Look if the topic is relevant.
And go for quality (relevant content, useful, not too much links, 'human' look)

[Vietnamese robot]

Thank you everyone for your inputs.
Absolutely useful words and I need to read read and read more info of this amazing forum and hope will come back with better result. I found Yahoo and Msn is easy to climb up but Google need much more works and time. And links seems like the best way to make my website to the top.
Thank you everyone again. I wish you guys lived somewhere near me :)

[LifeinAsia]

Another site of mine has 3000 link has linked to my site 4 months ago but google and alexa said 0.

IMHO Google's backlink reporting hasn't been working for some time. Sites I'm involved with have thousands of other sites linking in- I can do the same check at Yahoo for verification. Yet Google currently shows less than 10 for each of them.

[otech]

Yeah, if you can set up some content thats relevant to your site on an edu site and link it across (and it has a little pagerank) then do it.

edu/gov sites dont just pass pagerank, they imply a good sense of credibility to your site aswell.

ie. you dont usually find spammers getting their hands on a gov or edu domain, thus links out are deemed reasonably credible which can help you weather storms in googles algo.

dont go overboard though, just one good quailty page should do it, any more and you might be pushing your luck.

[redline85]

Resource, founded on searchengineswatch.com

[x-href.com...]
I've readed, and think that this service can be useful, but I wanted to hear something about it from guru guys. What do you think about it?

From one side, it's ok, cause I can boost my main web project, at the expense of my other resources.

From the other side - I'm frightened, cause I don't hear nothing about services like this.
Please advice.