Part of linkbuilding month for beginners At Hobo!
Buying links that are search engine friendly is against Google TOS. If you buy links to take the risk Google will penalise you (from a reduction in your toolbar pagerank, up to removing your site from it’s index).
If buying links was ineffective, it wouldn’t be against Google TOS. Think about that.
I can’t remember the last vertical I checked there wasn’t people buying links to improve search engine placement – so the competition is doing it. Last time I checked, they were ranking pretty good.
I can’t advise you to buy links but I can’t honestly advise you not to – although I will point out again Google will take you down if it finds out.
If you are buying links, make sure your links aren’t obviously paid links, though. That is, don’t buy links from obvious places. If Google gets better at detecting these, it’s the obvious paid links that will be hit first.
I can say, I don’t buy links. It is too risky in 2012.
There are still plenty of ways to get links without paying for them:
I would say anyone not buying links is not competing in competitive enough niches. Unless you have a product that is truely amazing and groundbreaking (think Twitter or Facebook) you are not going to be able to get enough links, or with targeted enough anchors, to rank for anything competitive. I have seen first hand experience of pretty much every top SEO company in the UK buying links for their clients. In some niches its impossible to not buy links, and still compete imo.
@ Phil I hear you. As I said, we don’t do it and at the moment I generally only take clients on in industries and with sites I think I can work with without buying links.