I’ve been chatting to a company recently about helping them with their SEO efforts - they’re looking to do the content and I’ll be doing the link development. Is an equitable split of work and they’re a reasonably well known brand - leaders within their field - just lacking generic positioning. And as we all know generic terms are where you’ll make incremental sales and attract new business.

During these discussions the subject of paid links came up - they have a budget for them. I’ve probably knocked myself out of the process by saying that I’d find it difficult to use this budget for this purpose - with Google being so anti-paid links. I explained that the links I’d build would exist permanently and would not be rented, there would be no threat of links going up in price etc. Or that when we’d finished the work that any further payment would be needed to maintain the links.

When I said this I got the response that ‘other companies‘ had mentioned it was ‘not approved‘ by Google but that it should be something they should use. At this I pressed the issue, being a nosey little so and so, to see if they’d tell me who these ‘other companies‘ were.

They did even better than that - they sent me the proposal. Which indeed lists paid links as a way of forming links that were acceptable and should be used to improve positions. I was slightly surprised by the company in question - as they’re a well known brand in SEO. A company who I know bits about and have generally seen in publications etc.

My interest in this is that this company could be putting their clients search engine positions in jeopardy. I’m what I consider to be an ‘ethical SEO’. Part of this, I feel, is not to endanger the long term stability of any clients online business. Paid links may not always give you problems - i.e. they may not get you removed from Google for using them, but they could. The risk is there and by using paid links I would be endangering the long term prospects for a client.

Anyway - let me know what you think.