Linkage and SEO

Linkage is very much a double edged sword, while crucial to attaining good rankings it is also the most likely cause of losing them.

The last few years have seen the rise of the links "industry" to the point where to many SEO now appears to be little more than a matter of acquiring links with the "correct" anchor text from high PR pages.
While doubtless the single most important factor in getting pages to rank, when on many SEO forums the automatic answer to any indexing/ranking problem is "get more high PR links" you know things have become seriously unbalanced.

This obsession with acquiring links is putting many webmasters on a collision course with the very entity they were trying to influence, Google.

In an attempt to counter link manipulation Google now strongly suggests that "advertising" links should be distinguished from "editorial" ones through the use of a redirect or a nofollow attribute, and while this seems aimed primarily at paid links there's some suspicion that exchanged links may not be too far behind.

Most "normal" sites don't need hundreds of links maybe not even dozens, but they do need them to be "natural", and natural links are hard to get without good reason.

Strictly commercial sites have always had a problem getting natural links but then few put much effort into doing so, and with the present ease of link acquisition there's that much less motivation.

Our suggestion is to plan for when exchanged or bought links may no longer be as effective as they are today and to develop websites that will gain "natural" links through their own merit, no doubt a lot more work and no little imagination, but it will minimise reliance on linkage methodologies Google is actively trying to "dissuade" us from using.

Specifically on the Google and paid links question, here's a couple of posts that sum-up the position quite nicely.