Will Google punish me for buying or selling text links?
There has been a lot of discussion over this on numerous web forums and SEO websites. Google's official policy is that they don't approve of "paid" text links. However they themselves sell sponsored text links on their own search results pages. Text link selling/buying remains a vital part of increasing search engine rankings and you can almost guarantee that any website listed highly in Google's organic search results has done so. Thus is is really a necessity for businesses to successfully match their competition in many cases.
Our service has been around for at least 3 years and we have had no reports of Google banning our customers for buying or selling text links. This is because our installation code/software used to publish the sold links is not detectable by the search engine bots. The paid links are simple, html based links that appear as natural as other links on the web pages where they appear. If Google started really penalizing websites for buying text links this also implies that your competitors could intentionally buy links to point to your website in an effort to harm your rankings. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely and there would be an industry wide outrage over such practices.
You can view this article online at:
http://www.backlinks.com/kb/index.php/article/google-punish