I've been reading that buying high pr text links can hurt your optimization in the eyes of google. Is this true?
Google will never penalize sites that bought backlinks. If they do so, our competitors can easily destroy our rankings
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank If i was you id take my advice available on http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank and link bait, its cheaper. Pay peaple to digg articles about your site and pay peaple to bookmark your site in delicious. It will do you well, also stumpleupon, pay peaple to stumpleupon your site, youll get loads of traffic from it. You can either pay peaple to do it or exchange them for you doing the same to there sites. Its really good for backlinks and traffic. Buying pr links can be expensive and not allways gurenteed to bring traffic in, atleast this way its more of a naturall way.
It will help. But you may be playing with fire if you don't include it as part of an Internet marketing strategy
Google undervalues bought links. I am not sure but they may know which sites sell links. Google terms these as artificial ranking methods and may not carry much weighting.
That's very possible under one condition; when G catches it. Some links look very natural, and buying a link is usually one way, so this itself is harder for G to know. Of course, it's not that simple. And I am sure some "obvious" links are purchased ones, like everyone can tell. Buying links in a natural form is the best way therefore, especially ones that are placed within content.