The difference exists in the degree of the penalties that the search engines will eventually give the web site for participating in link brokering and link farm schemes. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner than later.

Currently, the SE's are unable to detect a Paid link's footprint. But, eventually, they will. And, there will be no penalty. It's just that the SE's will not count that specific link in calculating pagerank. When buying your links, just make sure that they are not under the section marked, "advertisers", or Sponsored Links", etc. Also make sure they aren't redirected links. Link farms are a different story. That is considered a bad neighborhood.

Search engines have generally taken up a policy of not penalizing you for what another site you have no control over does. If it becomes overly apparent that lots of link farms are linking to you, then in more cases than not you are somehow behind it, so that's not such a hot idea. If there are sites that Google doesn't approve of linking to you, generally they will just discount your link.

The "catch" in your original question is, quite simply, the quality of the links. The 240 one-way links you're talking about are almost certainly links within various B-list directories ... not too valuable at all.

Thanks everyone!

At this moment I'm only searching for quality links: MIN a PR4 for a not related site and MIN a PR3 for a related site.

( these are quality links in regard to my PR0 site )

If someone is interested in exchanging links with a spy-, gadget-, or tracking related site, don't hesitate to contact me

Something strange I've noticed is that if I open my pages in google's cache they seem to have a PR2 and if I open them in real time they have a PR0. Someone an explanation?

Kind regards,
Kris

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