It’s inevitable, I suppose, that those who’ve just discovered SEO – or even those who’ve been at it for a while – will wonder what’s wrong with paid links. They’ll even ask about it in our SEO Chat forums, as you can see at the link. The first point that comes to mind, of course, is that paid links purchased in order to manipulate your standing in Google’s SERPs are explicitly against the search engine’s terms of service. Period. If you want to pay for a link on a website just because its traffic might be interested in what you have to offer, that’s different. Say you restore and sell muscle …