Well, seeing as buying links is considered bad by Google, I'm not concerned. I would hope that everyone would question the integrity of anyone they purchased something from. I believe that's what the trader ratings are for. Am I just the first person to vocalize what everyone seems to consider and "old trick"? If the search engines are powerless to stop this, shouldn't that be the concern? As I stated before, this is not a technique that I employ. I was hoping that someone would say "well Google does this to check that and this is why it won't work". I must say I'm concerned about the legitimacy of a lot of websites now.
Why don't you just leave the links page as-is? It's only one page on your site - let the link party begin. (I know, it's only hypothetical... wink wink)
tricking google it seems more like tricking us , not google , the ones that makes link exchanges will be tricked here.And when tricking begins everybody will suffer at the end.
When checking traffic on my sites, I've noticed that 7 people from this forum have visited. Is everyone checking my robots.txt and looking for "nofollow" attributes on my link pages? I had a good laugh anyways ^_^