Buying links and getting nowhere?

Good read, but not sure that the article is spot-on. In my opinion, it is probably not accurate.

Nice dismissal, but it's wrong.

That's only two out of this list. What percentage of web traffic doesn't use one or more of these? There is enough traffic that does for Google to draw accurate conclusions.

"Examine some of the traffic tracking sources:
Google Search: Google knows how you got there and they track where you went when you leave
Google Analytics: By offering webmasters an invaluable traffic tracking tool Google also has access to everyone coming and going from your site and they know how they got there.
AdSense: Publishers and Google both earn money but Google also gets the same data they would from Google Analytics for all pages with AdSense so it's a traffic data goldmine
Blogger: Offering publishers a free place to publish also gives Google yet more traffic data mining opportunities
YouTube: More of a destination than a traffic tracker, but people following links, viewing embedded videos, etc. are providing even more traffic data albeit somewhat expensive
Google+: Blogger on steroids and those G+ buttons all over the place are just more traffic monitors.
Google Maps: Embedded maps on virtually every About or Directions page on the planet tracking traffic.
Various other products, APIs, etc. all contribute to the total."

The point was not whether link buys are trackable or not. Google is beyond that.

"What webmasters don't realize is when you participate in link schemes that are designed just to pass page rank that Google's monitors placed all over the World Wide Web know that those pages DO NOT generate any traffic. Using the seismic monitoring metaphor again, they know those paid link pages, directories, etc. are not on an active fault because no people, aka tremors, ever come from those pages."

I think the author is onto something and hope he is right.

One of the reasons why I started to add niche relevant sites to my network, a couple in each niche per month, and make the content also more appealing to the reader, that way it should start to rank better and attract visitors, that perhaps even come back now and then.

Right now it's only a small % but as I keep on adding my final goal is to rank sites with only links from niche relevant domains and then I'm invincible for Google, whoehahahaha

ps: Despite Google's, somewhat limited, capabilities I haven't seen any proof of this happening. The author says that Panda & Penguin are proof of that but that's something that stands on it's own. If all this was the case then my network and the networks of most SEO companies would've already been deindexed massively. Think about it, why did they had to take BMR and ALN and such manually down a year ago?

I think that webmasters are allowed to make some mistakes in the eye's of Google, like they are tolerant to a certain extend but once you do too many things wrong then they tank you. It's always a combo of things.