Tonight I'm tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that's always a tough task. Thus, I'll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I'm happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers - companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings. This practice does violate Google's Quality Guidelines as well as other engines' desires, as do most of the direct forms of paying money to get a link that will assist with organic search rankings (I say "most" because the Yahoo! Directory and a few others like it may be exempt).

I've listed some of our general thoughts about paid links:

• Buying/selling links is an inherently high risk activity
• Certain smart methodologies may temporarily reduce that risk, but never to zero (at least, in my opinion)
• The size, credibility and importance of your organization strongly impacts how you might be penalized by the engines (large companies and popular websites are far less likely to receive harsh penalties or bans in the same way smaller orgs might)
• To perform SEO is to decide that the environment and rules created by the search engines is, for better or worse, your ecosystem
• Choosing to manipulate that ecosystem in ways that violate the engines' rules or intent is not necessarily immoral or unethical but it is potentially damaging to your business (if you rely on search engine traffic)

I want to set the record straight publicly about where I (and SEOmoz) stand vis a vis recommending link buying and link selling as SEO practices.

1. We no longer recommend paid links, link ads, link buying or selling to any of our active clients
2. We do this because we believe that the risk to reward ratio is too high and not because of ethical, moral or legal reasons
3. Our stance has also changed because we feel that paid links no longer offer long-term, high yield value for SEO campaigns, and that other methodologies that require similar effort and finances are almost always more accretive and less risky

This doesn't mean that I want to take back the things I've said in the past about individual link sellers or those SEOs who endorse paid links or link brokers. If your business has risk tolerance for buying or selling links and you go into it with your eyes wide open, I have no problem with that. The businesses and individuals we've recommended in the past value their customers, provide a high level of service and are smart operators. Many of them also offer "white hat" link building and SEO services which we'd still recommend today (some have even left the link ads business entirely).

If you're buying or selling links today, my general feeling is that there are other, more valuable, less dangerous tactics that will add long term value to your SEO. There may be cases where, particularly for large companies, link buying is a low-enough risk activity to make some sense, but as a rule, and as part of SEOmoz's commitment to our core values of transparency, generosity, quality and empathy, paid links aren't going to be part of our toolbox going forward.

p.s. I'd love to hear in the comments how those of you who run consulting businesses or offer SEO consulting services deal with this issue in messaging to your clients.