You know what cracks me up, this horses ass in #3 or so for the site I got his so called banned for for the term atlanta real estate agent in Google
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...l+estate+agent hmmm :mrgreen:

that settles it SEO Guy, can you get me banned too please?

[QUOTE=SEO Guy]When I get a new client, right away I buy them PR[QUOTE]

What are the average costs for this? My page ranking has dropped from 4 to 3 recently for no apparent reason, after being 4 for nearly a year.

http://www.seo-guy.com/link-popularity/

Heres a great website to find out more about how to improve your Google PageRank http://www.google-consultant.com

external links pointing into your site can get your site banned from google.

some examples:
people can do a 302 hijack
people can meta refresh penalties onto your site

I know many of the top link brokers who have told me that some sites were specifically penalized for buying powerful off topic links.

What people don't seem to have touched on is that getting a high page ranking doesn't make for good traffic.
Sure it may get your page listed higher than before, but if that listing is for the wrong thing it won't do a thing for your number of repeat visitors.

If you get new 100 visitors a day and of those there's 20 coming back that's nice.
Now you get 10.000 visitors a day for a week and 100 of those come back.
Lots of one-off traffic, possibly people who don't like your site and feel cheated for being sent there (and they'll blame you for getting your page listed for searches it shouldn't have been).
That's negative press as those people will talk to friends and maybe even blog about it.

>and maybe even blog about it.

if people blog about your site you get links...and thus more link popularity and more rankings.