Buying and selling links to directly influence search engine ranking algorithms has been a hot button in the SEO community for several years. The topic first started to really heat up back in 2005 when Google began taking stronger action against publishers and advertisers who bought and sold keyword targeted text links.

Today the search engine war against paid link profiteers still rages on, but with the majority of buyers and sellers going underground, the battle has become more of a guerrilla style conflict that is being fought through site by site skirmishes (penalties), media intimidation (education) and threat of treason (de-indexing).

Because of the problematic nature of purchasing links, it amazes me when I encounter new creative openly promoting links in the form of a commodity. Such was the case few days ago when I was deleting a bunch of spam from an old email account that I no longer use and noticed the following email that was just sent the day before.

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MegaLink Deal – 4 packages left!
*Note: Actual names, numbers, email addresses and domains have been changed.

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Hello James,

Fortunately, due to some great partnerships this holiday season, we’ve been able to form what we call a MegaLink Package. This MegaLink Package includes 150,000 links plus 1,000 Twitter followers for a special rate of $1650 per month!!!

Here’s what is included:
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Yesterday morning I received an email with a link in it to a new cnet article titled “Link exchanges: The poor man’s SEO”. Since link popularity building is an integral part of any search engine optimization campaign, I had to see what this longstanding publication had to say on the subject. I was more than a little shocked when I read the second sentence:

“Everyone else has to rely on the poor man’s search-engine optimization: the link exchange.”

I could hardly believe that cnet would seemingly recommend to website owners to participate in trading links to increase search engine rankings. There are many other free and low-cost link building alternatives that are actually endorsed by SEO professionals.

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