The SEO and Linkbrokerage industry has changed the last couple of weeks and months since the big Google update. I for myself started concentrating more on domaining, just to make sure I do not overreact and pull all my links and dump all my linkpartners after my blackhat projects went down the drain.
 
Linkselling: The Linkbrokers
 
But with one eye on the domains and one in the forums and blogs I felt cross-eyed lately and decided to start blogging again for jabz to clear my head. So, what has changed exactly? From my point of view the semi professional linkbuilders gave up or just lowered their prices and keep selling incredibly cheap and worthless semi-high PageRank links to their customers. If you are looking for PR 1-6 with no traffic and tons of links, you can find them in digitalpoint and similar forums or at text-link-ads.
The former professional linkbrokers, from what I can say, left stage. Only few remained to offer their clients the same linkspots as usual for a better price or a longer period of time. Depends if the site lost PageRank or not. They still believe in this green beast even after it dropped from PR 7 to PR 4 or even worse. Most of the pros do not know it but since Google`s PageRank/ algorithm update last year, they are selling traffic not PageRank nor Rankings. That is why many of the black-hats pulled their links from those sites.
There are only few survivers (believe it or not....time will show) who really try to come up with some new ideas. Some founded linkbuilding agencies or ...no, I should stop here. I heard of some beatiful ideas, i do not want to ruin it for them. I hope you understand.
 
Linkbuying: The Search Engine Optimizers
 
The Search Engine Optimizers on the other hand are trying to recollect how they started. A few years ago  thought that`s over but the good old times are back. I get linkexchange requests everyday. For example from Dave Smith (I doubt it`s his real name) who writes every single day something like this to me:
Hello,

Best regards,
Dave
 
Today I received three mails from him and one from my friends at linkhelpers.net.
Another funny way to get traffic is youtube-subscription spam. I suffer very bad from that one as well, as I have multiple youtube accounts, most of the inactive and full of spammer-subscribers. After comment-spam this seems to be the next big thing. You subscribe to as many channels as possible just to get a bit of traffic. Ridiculous but true.
However, what I wanted to show/ say is that the majority of SEOs is moving backwards and not downwards, like Eric Ward assumed on searchengineland today.
If you are a SEO and you have trouble getting links, try to stick to these easy rules, I outlined in my post on how to buy links the right way. I think these rules are still pretty good.