I've said it for months: Buying links is a bad idea! Matt Cutts and many other industry experts have explained that link buying is not a good way to SEO your website. WE LISTENED and have never purchased links for any clients. I did a couple of years before I started SpryDev but that was before I knew any better.

Finally, Google has come out with a crystal clear statement about buying links. Last week they updated their Webmaster Guidelines on this topic. Here is their text in full (Emphasis mine.):

Prior to Google (1988) search engines used a myriad of schemes to determine the rank of results in the search engines. Some used the frequency a term appeared on a page. Others used the keyword Meta tag. Yahoo used human power to evaluate and create a massive directory. All those methods lacked two things: authenticity (they're easy to fake) and scalability (it's impossible to evaluate every single website by hand).

Want to start your own reciprocal link campaign? Here’s where to begin. First, seek out the websites you would like to exchange links with. Be sure to choose partners with valid/complimentary information and products. Do not choose competitors or sites that will diminish your credibility. The goal is to provide your customers with additional, useful information.

Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, had his blog hacked today! (See Screenshot here. ) Matt is actually a great guy and spends a lot of his time helping the SEO community with insights in ot how to best work with Google. It's a shame that this happened. This just goes to show you that no one is immune to hackers. If it can happen to the almighty Google then it can...wait a minute. Today is April 1st...April Fools Day.

-digs around-

Here's a great strategy for getting high-quality links: Write a testimonial for a company whose products or services you use. For example, we have several SEO testimonials from our customers. Each one contains a link to our customer.

Of course you want to make sure that they include links to their customers in the testimonial. Just search their site and find one. If they do, you're in luck! This is a great way to get a high-quality, relevant link.

For years Google has underreported the link: results which show how many inbound links a particular website has. [example: link:www.sprydev.com] This was done deliberately because Google feared (rightly so) that people would use the link data to influence their results.