Googles battle on paid links is in full steam ahead and they seem to be winning the war. Buying or selling links without the “no follow” tag is now officially a blackhat SEO way of doing things that is against Google’s  Guidelines in Webmaster tools.

Google can  and will aim to penalize sites that blatantly buy and sell links. If you are buying or selling links do it covertly & do it and stay under the google radar don’t ever put your link in an advert selling links.

However, there may be a better way than trying to buy a link from a website:  Just buy the site. While this will not work for a big company website, those links have long been scraped of  any link authority anyway. In fact, anyone who is blatently selling may already have their link juice passing privileges crushed.

So who does that leave?

Generally, the sites you can still purchase links that can pass link juice (help you site rank in the SERPs) will be smallish to medium sites with just one owner who more than likely builds websites as a hobby. In those instances, where you’ve already gone through the bother of finding out who owns the site and getting in contact with them, why offer to buy a link for a few hundred a year? Wouldn’t you be better served by just making an offer on the entire website?

If you bought the site you’d get any revenue it was producing, any potential appreciation from the domain name, and total design control (you could link to some or all of your other sites). Websites are cheap to run and set up these days so most people will snap up a offer if the price was right. Have a look on sites like Digitalpoint there are hundreds of webmasters selling PR2 websites for next to nothing but selling links for a few dollars a month!

So if you are going to ask someone to buy a link, perhaps the first question you ask them shouldn’t be “Would you sell me a link on this page for 1 year?” but rather “Can I buy your site  from you for this much”

If you buy the entire site then you’re no longer violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by changing where it links. Win Win don’t you think?