In this article by David Utter, he has found an SEO company I certainly admire. They have sworn off link buying and I hope others follow suit. I have never had full confidence in this practice and this is step in the right direction.

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David Utter
Staff Writer
Published: 2005-10-14

The strategy of purchasing text links on other sites to improve rankings within search engines may be having a negative impact instead.

British search engine marketing firm Site Visibility disclosed in a press release that it won't be buying any more text links. Further, they plan to prevent existing links they've purchased from impacting a site's ranking.

The rise of Google, Yahoo, and other search engines has made high ranking a priority for online businesses. Many companies have responded to the need for better search engine marketing with an array of strategies to garner better placement.

One factor impacting a site's ranking has been the number of inbound links to a site. Firms like Site Visibility would purchase inbound text links to sites on other sites. As the number of links increase over time, a particular site would be lifted in search engine results.

Site Visibility said it is taking this action to avoid endangering its clients from being penalized by the search engines. The usual penalty for sites that try to overaggressively game the system is to be banned from the search engine instead.

It will be interesting to see how many other SEM firms may follow suit. The company's John Everton, search engine marketing account manager, wrote more about the company's decision in the statement:

"While we do not believe that our link purchasing has ever negatively impacted search engine results, we have decided to change our approach and take a pro-active move towards helping search engines maintain natural search results." He goes on to add, "As an ethical search engine marketing company it is important that Site Visibility is seen as a business that only adopts SEO techniques that are considered ‘white-hat.' Any border-line search engine marketing practices are eventually picked on up by the top search engines and in our market we cannot afford to take risks with our client's brands and websites."