Everyone knows that you have to have inbound links into your site in order for the search engines to value it and rank it highly against your chosen keywords. But is it better to buy those links from a link broker or directly from the site itself, or to go through time-consuming effort of building reciprocal links?
Let us be clear: both of these methods are clearly against the spirit of the Google ranking algorithm, which uses the quality and quantity of inbound links as a substitute for having someone actually look at your site and take a view on its quality and value. Quite apart from the subjective nature of such a judgment, the sheer number of web pages out there would make this an impossible task. So links are – for better or for worse – the easiest proxy for a human judgment. However, both paid links, or text link ads, and reciprocal links clearly subvert the intent of the link-counting algorithm, since neither of them represent the disinterested judgment of real people; both are nakedly designed to deceive Google and the other search engines into thinking that more people value your site than your competitors, when quite the opposite might be...