Link building is considered the backbone of every successful website on the planet, at least in the eyes of the major search engines.  This being so, it’s no wonder that website owners go to great lengths to seek out links from so called “high ranking” websites; a single inbound link from an authority website can outweigh the benefits received from backlinks from scores of no-authority websites, at least in terms of search engine rankings.  This, in essence, is why Google has once again made the news about their stance against websites that sell links. 

Apparently, selling links for the purpose of passing Page Rank, Google’s proprietary metric that determines a web pages value based on inbound links, has always been against Google’s policies; only now the search engine giant is getting serious about enforcing this policy.  So much so that it seems the webmaster community as a whole is up in arms about the changes being seen and felt by those who rely on paid linking strategies and those who believe that websites shouldn’t be penalized for selling links.

None of this, however, should really be news because several months ago it was made known that Google would be taking action against websites who participated in selling links and the websites that were benefiting from paid links that passed Page Rank.  Matt Cutts, a senior engineer for Google’s Webspam team, touched on what he talked about back in June about the coming repercussions of buying and selling links, and he brought the subject up once again with a very specific example of the problems that buying and selling links can have for a search engine that attempts to return high quality and relevant results each and every time.

For more in-depth insight into the current plight for website owners who buy and sell links, Webpronews.comhas several articleson the subject as of late and Seoroundtable.com posts some clarifications on the subject as well as some direct links to real-user discussions about the topic.