The same thing happens everyday on the web with new sites. You take a lot of time designing a new website. You dump in a lot of hard work. You bring the site online for good, put the link to it in a few places, and hold your breath. You're waiting for it to take off, but it just seems to be stumbling. You try everything you can, but nothing is making enough difference. So you bite the bullet and buy a backlink from a high page rank site in hopes of gaining both traffic and a higher position in the search results.

To see if this tactic still works, let's look at Google's standpoint. According to Matt Cutts, Google is absolutely against buying backlinks, as this defeat the purpose of a backlink as a "vote" for another site since it is paid.

In the past, Google has not been able to cut down effectively on this practice. They employ a lot of very smart people and they are getting better at it. While they may not find out today of purchased links they are determined and it's just a matter of time.

There are 3 possible solutions if you really want to purchase links to help out your site, depending on your goals.

One solution is to purchase a backlink from a site that does not normally do this or would not be suspected. This means avoid link brokers, and avoid the sites that blatantly advertise that they sell links. Those are easy to figure out. I don't recommend this method, but some webmasters are doing it with success at the moment.

The second solution is for those wanting mainly the traffic from a high page rank site of the same topic. The best way here is to have a rel="no follow" put in the link itself so Google will not count the link as a backlink and thus no possible penalty. If you want the visitors directly from the link, then this is by far the best way to go.

The third solution is to join a valid link exchange system (definitely not a link farm) and naturally exchange with other sites which is not easy, but it's playing by the rules.

Buying links to help your search engine ranking in this day and age of Google running the show is pretty risky and there has been numerous examples of buying links directly lowering a site's ranking. Buying links as a quick way to boost your site's ranking has really become one of those outdated methods for those who want to remain in a good position once you've worked so hard to achieve it.

Over the years, many search engine tactics have been used. Some are still valid like backlinks, especially on-topic ones. Some are not, like keyword stuffing. Inside I'll discuss if buying links from high page rank sites is still valid.