How long will people be able to buy their way to the top of Google?

[caringneo]

I agree with asianslave.
A LinkList owner may not like it, but google is clearly states that excessive reciprocal link exchange is considered as LinkSchemes which is indented to boost your site ranking.

http://google.com/support/webmasters...y?answer=66356

We all know that LinkLists demand reciprocal links for boosting the ranking in search engines. So are those guys who are buying links.

This trend only stop when google starts giving equal importance to the content on page and probably some way of user rating (which google is already doing with iGoogle).

[tickler]

Originally Posted by caringneo

This trend only stop when google starts giving equal importance to the content on page and probably some way of user rating (which google is already doing with iGoogle).

Or maybe actual surfer ranking based on SERP clicks.

Links in Google SERPs change on click
Google's onclick SERP tracking has been around for a long time. I think there was even a deconstruction of it on the WebmasterWorld few years ago.

Recently, they changed the redirects at /url to be client-side, rather than server-side, for a significant proportion of users - and went as far as announcing this publicly.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3918680.htm