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This link gives direct access to the overture view bid data: overture view bid More...

Ok go to this page in Overture and select which country you are in. Then just fill out a few quick bits of (fake) information and you will be taken to a keyword suggestions page. Enter in your keywords and Overture will give you some very handy data.  A whole lot more than they offer in their basic tools to the public. You can see your search term, its monthly search volume, the top bid for each term, and est. of clicks, est. of CPC and the est. of total cost. You can also see terms that get a lot of monthly search traffic, which are not being bid on. So you can get good traffic for cheap.

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This article was written in August 2004 and was speaking mostly about High Pagerank Monthly Links.  At the time I saw a lot of people spending massive amounts of money on monthly high PR links without any consideration of whether or not the links were actually working.  It can get real costly if you buy a lot of links and only half of them work, but you dont know which half since you bought them at the same time.  In that scenario it would be impossible to tell which links you should keep and which ones you shouldnt

It is just as good of an idea today as it was back then to build links slowly over time.  Too many links at once is a good indicator to the search engines that someone is artificially trying to inflate their rankings.

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The tiered approach to buying links is a simple concept that will save you money. Buy a few links, see how they effect your rankings, and then buy a few more. If you buy tons and tons of links all at once there will be no way of knowing how many links you actually needed to get to the top of the rankings.

Selling text ads is a normal practice probably since websites began to be used for commercial purposes. When Google came up with its PageRank algorithm, and people started to have access to the PageRank value through the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), they also gave (unwillingly?) the possibility to measure the value of a page.

Google owns PageRank and does not allow anybody to buy, sell or trade PageRank. Often people mistake buying, selling and trading links for buying, selling or trading pagerank, but there is a fundamental difference.

"Many webmasters are seeing significant drops in traffic, up to 80% in some cases within the last 24 hours. In contrast others are reporting significant rises in the SERPs which indicates a big change (which imo is not sandbox related).” Seroundtable has a question and answer
form to fill out if you have been effected. This will help to figure out a pattern perhaps. 
Seroundtable

If selling PageRank is illegal as per Google, why does Google show such ads in Google Adwords? There was an interesting discussion on this very issue sometime back in WMW

AdWordsAdvisor (AWA), a Google Adwords representative at WMW provides a first-cut feedback on this.

Advertising to assist with PageRank isn’t a problem. Selling PageRank, however, is another thing - and ads/sites are reviewed on a case-by-case basis along these guidelines.

Here is a link to AWA’s comments.

Here’s a robots.txt tutorial to help you make sure you have your robots.txt files are properly set up. Mistakes can be costly.
Here’s a handy robots.txt validator