Paid links are a time-honored way to get traffic to your site and increase your relevancy with Google. Google's algorithm relies heavily on backlinks to your site to determine its popularity among users, and therefore its search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, Google decided a while back that paid "do-follow" links interfere with its rankings. If it catches you using them, it will drop your ranking and maybe even ban your site entirely!

But this hasn't stopped people from using paid text links to their sites. It has, however, made people more careful how they go about it. If you want to help your site out with paid text links, here are three rules you should follow.

Stagger your link-buying. Don't just go off and buy all of your links at once. This doesn't follow the organic linking pattern. It can stick out like a sore thumb to pretty much any search engine.

Make sure you stagger your bought links. You definitely don't want to buy them all on the first day you put your site up! Make a few social bookmarking links to your website, a few days after it's been up, and buy some links shortly afterwards.

It's also a good idea to buy new links when you post new content. This is consistent with organic links to a site. A site naturally gets links with new content, as people see the new content and bookmark it, talk about it in their blogs, link directly from their sites, and what have you.

Replace old paid links with new ones. The links you buy will not only help your search engine rankings, but will also get you some good traffic to boot. But occasionally these links stop producing the results they first did. If you've got a whole lot of these links from the same source, and they're not working out any more, don't drop them all at once!

This is another indicator to Google and other search engines that you've been buying links. A steep drop in links basically says, "I bought them and now I don't want them anymore." This is not the message you want sent out!

Instead, slowly replace your old links with a new source. If you've found another place to buy links, you can replace them with the new source. You might also consider a social bookmarking service, article marketing, etc.

DO NOT BUY FROM PLACES THAT ADVERTISE THE FACT THAT THEY SELL LINKS. It's rude to yell like that on the internet. But this one deserves all caps! If you've bought a link with one of these places, Google has your number. Cancel your service immediately. And don't ever do it again!