Why paying for the links is not recommended by Google? I have seen in few places the information about Paid Links and that buying links is not good.

First of all, how could Google know that links have been purchased? Secondly even Google sells its real estate space. Their adwords links on the right are paid for.

This is totally unfair. Is Google saying that only Google can make money from the links?

I think Google now want you to have all external links marked with NOFOLLOW attribute. They want to stop paid links effect their index, which uses natural linking to determine site ranking, and not links that had to be paid for.

Which means, if you ever want to sell advertising on your site, and your site has high Pagerank, never use Pagerank as the incentive.

Big percentage of websites on the net have advertising as a way to create revenue. But the honest websites sell their advertising, because they offer high traffic. And all the other ones are trying to use Pagerank.

They also understand that paid links are here to stay as part of web economy, but as a webmaster you have to make sure that Pagerank is not being passed. And you can do it in two ways.

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google mainly doesn't like paid links because it competes with their own adwords/adsence system!

I don't use this strategy much myself (often not at all for most sites), however I do see some competitors to one of my client ranking at the top based on it. Personally I think if you buy the right links that aren't obvious, and do it as a small percentage of your total link building strategy you should be ok.

And don't be fooled by site's pagerank / alexia rank, both can be faked.

Matt
Marketing Web

Google invests nearly nothing (compared with its turnover and revenues) against buying/selling links. Google relies mainly on reports from your competitors if you buy PR links. A lot of current high PR sites have bought PR links in the years 2000/2007 and get quickly top ranking. Now their top ranking makes it easier to get natural links.

Paid links are also helpful, it is not so that paid links don't work. If you check about dot com then it purchase paid link and it works.