If you are an SEO and you are not aware of Matt Cutts’ strong opposition to buying links, you must have been living under a rock. However, my hunch is that most businesspeople (at least those who don’t live and breathe SEO) are naive to Google’s tough stance — and to the risks!

My SEO How-To article in the January/February issue of Practical Ecommerce was meant to give ecommerce business professionals a (hopefully) balanced view of the risks and the opportunities of link buying. Before you have a go at link buying or selling you might want to give it a read.

What’s tricky, even for seasoned SEOs, is figuring out if a site that’s selling links has been made, and its voting power taken away by Google — particularly if you aren’t already advertising with the site. You can glean valuable clues by sizing up the existing advertisers and past advertisers (perusing previous versions of the site in The Wayback Machine). You can’t tell by the PageRank score, or from the link: SERPs — that would be too easy, and Google doesn’t want to be that easy.

Of course, just because Google is talking tough about link buying/selling, the tactic isn’t going to go away any time soon. It is a tactic that works. At least for as long as you stay under the radar!

And if you aren’t convinced how well it works on Google, have a look at my SEO Report Card of Freshpair.com in the current issue of Practical Ecommerce, where I critique some of the backlinks purchased by aggressive link buyer Freshpair.com. It is always fun to reverse engineer an aggressive link buying campaign and this one was no exception. Hopefully I won’t get too much hate mail from Freshpair for airing this in public! 🙂