V7N’s Contextual Links offering received a lot of online coverage and comments, first here on Marketing Pilgrim, then at Search Engine Journal and Matt Cutts’s blog.
The debate may rage on over the “ethical” nature of paid links. A more important subtext to that debate is the overall effectiveness of link buying as a strategy to improve search engine rankings

Peter da Vanzo on V7N’s SEO blog announced Wednesday that V7N is entering the link buying field. No, they’re not buying links for themselves—they’re offering a service similar to Text Link Ads. But, of course, different.
V7N boasts that their Contextual Links system is superior to any other link buying because the links they’re selling are completely “unmarked” and undetectable as paid links to Google or anyone else

It seems like every other week, someone will come out with a story that just catches fire in the SEO community. After all, we SEOs need something to gossip about don’t we? The story of the week has been Google indexing CSS & JS files. From there Threadwatch & Wolf Howl picked it up.
I think most of these people have it wrong though

If you’re not sure of the best way to buy links or how to judge if the link will benefit your web site, Text Link Brokers (a Pilgrim Partner) has published a Beginners Guide to Buying Links for SEO.
Here’s an example of the great advice contained in the guide…
The total number of outbound links on a page is an important factor to consider when purchasing a link