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I don't think Eric said not to buy links. I think his point was if you're buying them you should be buying them for the direct traffic they can bring and not purchase links for the seo benefit.
There's nothing at all wrong with buying links. If buying links was wrong then so is advertising in general. Google prefers we don't buy links. Given that I would think it logical they try to discover links they think have been purchased.
But can they really tell a natural link from a paid link? Depends on how you go about buying them. Like John said if you leave as a footprint lots of links with the exact same anchor text it probably sends off a flag. If you buy an occasional contextual link each time with different anchor text it's hard to see how they could figure it out.
People do leave footprints though when linking and search engines are able to collect a lot of data. I think Eric's main point was that since Google has stated they don't care for paid links and are likely working to discount them you never know if the links you are buying may one day be discovered as paid and discounted. So when buying links think in terms of the direct traffic from the link (which is still a good reason to buy a link) and consider any seo benefit as icing on the cake.
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