Site owners would fare far better in the long run if they placed less emphasis on getting their site ranked and allocated more resources towards utilizing traditional marketing tactics online to generate targeted traffic.
Buying rankings
There has never been a worse time to rely on paid links from brokers than right now .. and it’s only getting worse. I find it unlikely that Google will ever be able to completely filter out all paid links and as such a market will always exist, but it’s getting to the point where the opportunity cost of buying a paid link is greater than the potential reward. As a webmaster with a budget, do you want to spend $100 per month to buy a text link on a site that is unlikely to drive any traffic, could lose it’s effect at any time without you knowing, has a chance of giving you no rankings boost ever due to Google already identifying it as a paid link, and with the odds getting worse for you everyday?
A wakeup call to small business website owners
Every time webmasters partake in actions for the sole purpose of improving rankings, they are slowly relinquishing control of their business to the search engines. By continually allocating resources to improving search rankings at the expense of other marketing channels (which is often the case for smaller businesses on limited budgets) site owners will increasingly rely on the search engines to bring them business. All is well when rankings rise, traffic surges and sales are at a high, but it can get to a point where the search engines (mainly Google) will be providing 80-95% of all traffic to a site, making the site one algorithmic hiccup away from going out of business.
Find your audience
Instead of slowly handing over your business to Google, try to develop other traffic sources. Find where your target audience hangs out on the web and see if you can buy an ad or get a link there. It may be nofollowed, but that’s not important since the link has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic. Sponsor relevant whitepapers, advertise in email newsletters, and focus on building your brand recognition. Find local or specialty directories and submit your site there. Make sure to check the quality of sites in the directory to make sure they’re not spammy and it’s a directory worth the money (if it’s not free). The quicker you can build defensible traffic and become less reliant on a single source for your traffic, the better off you’ll be in the long run.