John Scott gives a rundown on the history of link buying and then 10 rules on buying links intelligently. (Yes, I do realize this is a post made in May, but I’m playing a little bit of blog catch-up this week and feel that the post is of good value.)

Google is still running link based algorithms. Google, however, wants to count links which were meant to be legitimate “votes” for a web page. Google does not want to count links as votes if those links were placed on a web page for monetary reward, or as spam.

Google would ideally prefer it if website owners did not buy links. Website owners, on the other hand, have an obligation to promote their sites and be responsible stewards of their investment.

Of all of the tips, which have the common theme of buying a vast mix of links, not just anchor text links, I really love this:

Buy Non-Keyword Links

One of the hardest things for the simpleton SEO to do is to buy non-keyword links. If only he could see for himself the rewards of those SEO’s who buy non-keywords links.

But of course, anybody can see those rewards. Just do a search on Google for the keyword of your choice, and then analyze the backlinks of the websites in the top ten. You’ll most likely discover that a surprising majority of those links do not contain keywords.

Read the rest of the post, John Scott on Link Building, click here!