Buying text links - Are google serious about their 'crack down'? I think not

the best they could do is devalue links on sites that are doing this, they cannot penalize a site for being listed on a known link selling site.

 

Yes this will go a long way in curtailing link trading,

but Google doesn't want to do this..

When asked, Cutts says it is because normal users like to see the green bar on the top.

 

Actually 'normal users' don't look at the green bar on the top. Only webmaster looking for link exchanges do....

 

Normal users would like it if Google put an image of banana there as well.

 

Yeah, but a guy like me, with a very low budget would be hurt by this as well.

I bought a PR 5 link for $10/month and a PR 6 for $50 a year (less than $5 a month) from this forum.

The only way they could do it is to basically e-mail a suspected link buyer offering to sale them a link. If they bite, then they get penalized.

I've got a few "inquiries" about advertising on my site and buying links through e-mail and I didn't respond to any of them. I have no way of knowing who is sending that e-mail. I'm definitely not going to respond to the one from a gmail account.

 

No my friend.. they do.. and they think its something really important.
I have meet people who think pagerank really tells about the quality of sites.

I have this friend, once he asked me how come I have such a low pagerank for one of my sites, he used to visit often. When I explained him why, he said I should work on getting a better rank as it tells about the quality of the site.
I was like laughing my ass off..

So for many non-webmaster (and even some webmasters) high Pagerank = Good, low pagerank = bad..

I really doubt that...