What does everyone think of buying links these days. It seems lots of sites are getting caught with paid links now that its easy to report them. All you have to do is crawl a competitor sites back links, then look for high PR links that look like obvious paid links and report them. They could be spending hundreds on this link that is now worthless. Is buying text links over?
Of course not. If you are a link seller, maybe you will get penalized. If you are a link buyer, You won't be penalized, only your link might be filtered. If Google penalize all link buyers, I will buy 10 links for my competitors and report them.
Personally, I think Google has a lot of balls dictating how people can conduct business and promote their own sites. Links == advertising. Just because Google counts those links doesn't mean people shouldn't conduct their advertising campaigns. In any case, Links are still, and always will be, big business and isn't going away. I don't think there is much of an issue with it.