Buying links to boost your search engine rank is a hot topic for debate. Rand Fishkin summarizes a recent SES San Jose panel where top link buyers and SEOs went toe-to-toe with Google’s Matt Cutts on whether buying links is/should be kosher.

Basically, Google doesn’t care if you buy links for the purposes of marketing your site. They just want you to include the rel=”nofollow” tag so that Google can tell a site isn’t endorsing/recommending your link. Webmasters and SEOs think that’s silly - especially because only a small portion of people have heard of “nofollow” - so if they play the good guys and do what Google says, they’re at a complete disadvantage to everyone else who has no clue about the tag.

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