At the moment I am being very patient and getting links either from directories or writing articles, and therfore generate links taht are related to my site one way or another. I currently have about 200 links (MSN shows 200 and Yahoo slightly lower). IWebtool predicts page rank of 5 ( I am not sure how accurate this is but it has risen from a 3 and then a 4 and to now a 5). However, I have recently been thinking about buying sitewide links for a monthly fee. The only problem is that they are not very related to my site but it would result in hundreds of links because they have hundreds of pages. I am wondering if this will give me the real push that I need to rank above competitors because it would result in me getting similar number of links. I am getting about 10-12 referrals (mostly from Google, a few from MSN) at the moment (my site is a month and half old) and has about 130 pages of original content on several subjects (nieches). I spend a lot of time writing them. Would it matter if I buy links from a site that does not really relate to my site and what do you think of buying links from a forum (again not realted to my site), which has about 1000 pages (1000 links).
Non related sites won't hurt you, but won't help much either. At least be on a page with a relevant title and content to what your site is about for the best effect. I'd rather have 1 link from a related site on one of their inner pages than to have 10,000 links sitewide on a site not related to my niche.
1. if you just all of a sudden bought 10,000 links to your site, it would raise a red flag. I would watch that. you should do linking in moderation over time. related content links are the best, any link helps. 2. Why pay, you can find 10's of thousands of sites to link with. and be careful if all those links jsut link to each other, it holds less value. I would to 250 or 500 links at a time from different sources...
Aye, sudden massive increase in link numbers would raise a red flag with Google at least (and probably Yahoo and MSN). You want to aim for nice steady increase in your links. There are reported to be some exceptions if you get some links from highly authorative sources when your "link explosion" occurs. Doubtful that any place where you can buy links will be considered authorative by SEs though.