Does buying link packages from WF members count as black hat?

What Google means by "paid link" is that a website should not link to another website (with an intention of boosting its backlink) just because it was paid some money to do so. However, when you pay a freelancer for linkbuilding, he's still building links (most probably) the "natural way." The sites that link to you in the end don't do it because you PAID THEM. You only paid some money to have someone do what you could have done yourself (like writing & submitting articles).

-Revolves

And then they suggest you join their AdWords program, where you bid against others for clicks on your links instead of paying directly for the links themselves.

Hmm.

You can argue that all backlinking is blackhat since you are creating links with the express purpose of manipulating your rankings. And there's very little Google can do about it - they created the situation where there are billions to be made with good SE rankings, so now they have to deal with it!

It could be said that paying anyone to "build backlinks" for you is definitely not natural...whether it's black hat or not depends on where you'd put the limit for black hat seo, I guess.

To be completely natural, what Google is saying is that by having a strong, authoritative site, people will NATURALLY want to link to your content. They may write a blog post mentioning what they found on your site, there may be sites that use your ideas as a resource to support their own arguments, etc. That's natural linking...

Unnatural linking is us trying to mimic that...by creating (or having created) links to our sites to make it look like natural linking. Maybe our content is not good enough to be naturally linked to, we don't want to wait the required time to actually receive natural links, etc. It's always us gaming the system to take advantage of a tactic to improve rankings that we know works.

Ye I'd say all SEO by definition, or at least how it's practiced, is unnatural.

So as the saying goes: When in Rome...

I just don't see the logic in the "natural" way. Like seriously, who would possibly have the time? And more over, if my site is about promoting toasters, how many people are going to go out of their way to link to it to say to their friends, "check out this great new site I found on toasters!" If I knew people who were writing blogs about finding toaster sites, I'd think they'd gone over the deep end.
But yeah, hopefully my outsourced links appear "natural" by whatever definition....

J.C. Pennys got busted on that - paid links (at least part)

Google will catch on to any method they consider as being 'black hat' or 'grey hat' or whatever colour you wish to label it. Paid links are a big no no and any legit seo'er who does such things should be fired! :-)

Google will say anything to protect their algorithm and prevent people from trying to manipulate the search engines. The reality is that it doesn't matter what they say. Backlinks will always be a major part of moving up search engine rankings. It is difficult to get backlinks naturally. However, I will say that it does not require a lot of backlinks to get high rankings for a lot of keywords. There are ways to make them look more natural, if that's the route you want to take. You can do this through article syndication.

Yes, buying links with the intention of "manipulating" search results thereby is BH.

Hi Mike81,

I have never heard anyone from Google make such a statement.

To quote Google exactly:
Source: Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help

Links purchased for the purposes of advertising should be considered white hat as long as they do not violate any ethical boundaries.

Just to sort of clarify, "buying link packages" isn't about buying 'paid links' on someone's site, it's paying some guy to spray your links all over the place Two different things, the latter I am pretty sure Google doesn't like But they created this reality, so they have to deal with it, and one suspects that somewhere down the line they would love to reduce the value of backlinks in favour of other, harder-to-manipulate ranking factors (some kind of social aspect, most probably) but I think we're a long way from that still...

Google only wants natural links. So that means any link you buy, be it from blog networks (such as seolv, ama etc) or getting links (sbookmarks, web2.0) to try to manipulate the serps is frowned upon google. So basically google is telling you to not build links at all and let other link to you naturally.

Yea right, that would take years to get ranked in the serps.

So do what google wants you to do or be slightly naughty, which all us IM'ers are (according to google's rules).