Is Link Building Unethical?

There's so much talk of link building being unethical. Questions are frequently raised about whether or not it's ok to pay someone to link to your site from theirs. In my opinion link building, when done right, is perfectly ethical.

Let me clarify. There are a number of companies out there doing massive scale link building for next to nothing - for a nominal fee they will just stick your link on hundreds or thousands of sites, varying in both quality and content. This type of building, in my opinion, is unethical for a number of reasons. First of all, companies offering to do this for owners of businesses often fail to tell those whose sites they are performing this link building for, that links on blacklisted sites can detrimentally affect ratings to your own site. If a website is involved in massive scale link sales of this nature, it's a pretty reasonable bet that it won't be long before they are penalised and potentially even blacklisted by Google. But aside from this, I really think this type of link building is basically just spam.

Although long winded, manually sourcing decent websites with related content and offering cash in exchange for a link is, I believe, perfectly ethical and legitimate.

Anyone who disagrees with the morals of this type of link building really ought to be questioning the morals of marketing and advertising on the whole.... and anyone questioning that should probably be questioning the ethics of capitalism... and well, let's not get into that!