Hi there, I'm four months into studying SEO and link building as I've been landed with running our organisations web site. I've read a lot of press that Google does not approve link buying for rank boosting. My question is this: I've been approached by a site that runs a forum that is complimentary to my site. They have asked if we would sponsor their forum - it would be a followed link in the form of an image of which we would determine the "alt" text. The page only has two external links and has a PR of 4 and is indexed. The site itself seems well optimised. Would you recommend I purchase this link? Its not astronomical but I do not want to hurt my current rankings as they are not particularity bad. Thanks in advance.
google itself doesn't allow link buying or selling. if you sell a link on your site, then the link needs to be nofollow to be compliant with google policy. but if a similar site links to you or you link to a similar site as a reference, there is nothing wrong with that. as long as google doesn't suspect any buying/selling