That is a total turn around from Matt's general attitude towards purchased links. I would love to see the exact quote and on what page of his blog you found it - much appreciated!!
remember google doesn't owe us anything so who says they are going to care if they can detect paid links correctly. I have nothing to fear because I never do paid links.
I think that we should not buy too much of links in a particular time and we should use the page rank tables for buying the links and it would do a lot of Good a PR5 can be easily reached if you have one PR6 links and two or three PR5 links
Sometimes it feels like Google wants people to use their services like, instead of buying or selling links, we should use Adsense and Adwords. I personally think buying links on relevant websites is fine.
Yes I know that thats why I posted it. I found it in in one of his replies to some ones question about a blog he did for this PR update I think it was for Jan 11th.
I personally dont see anything wrong with buying links for getting traffic to a newer site and even one or two occasional links just for PR. Just make sure that you don't do it on sites that outright say things like "increase your sites PR" on their site as that for sure would let Google know you are buying links for increasing PR which is against Googles guidlines.
This G's strategy will rather result in creation of some kind of anonymous link exchange services, or something like that. I don't believe that there's any way to track linking made by personal webmaster-to-webmaster agreement, or exchanged through schemes excluding cross linking. Those who will need links will find a way to get them.
Something just popped into mind. Ok, so paid links are no good. And there is no way commercial sites like aplus.net or amazon.com or ebay etc will ever link to anybody except for sites in their own network. But so many of these sites made for adsense are found by some kind of link. Some of them could be paid as well. So I guess those sites that have adsense will have to purchase adwords to drive traffic. Alot of sites depend on sponsors to advertise on their site to cover their costs of hosting, maintenance, development etc. In my situation, the only time I really linked to a site was when I made my homepage in school and those links aren't allowed to be indexed by search engines. I linked to Cnn, Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, Oracle, MP3, Yahoo and Zone. After that in 7 years, I don't remember linking to anybody. Never really cared about linking and never cared if anyone linked to me either. This is before I really had any understanding of what linking is all about, meaning just an average person making a site. Who knows, lets see where this all leads to.
They're terrible - I've been pestering them for a link exchange for ages! I have a link to Google.com on my homepage but they refuse to put a link to mine on theirs!
On other issue came to mind. Isn't buying links just like advertising. You put your ad on tv, radio, newspaper or any other broadcasting medium and your company gets exposure. Companies like Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Ford & Chrysler spend tons of money advertising. Same goes with the internet, you put your link on different sites and you get exposure. The words which google used went something like 'instead of spamming your link all over the internet'.......... and after taht i cant remember. The post is on the googlewebmasters blogspot. Lets see where all this goes to.
I dont remember but I already told you its on Matt Cutts blog in a comment he answered on Jan11th or around there. And no I am not going to waste my time looking through all those comments again if you want to see it just go to his blog and look for it yourself. Also if you do find it and I misread please post it on here and let me know