If one more person tells me that their ‘friend’ paid $250 and is now ranked 1st on Google…
NO! You can’t do it! Here’s the deal: the search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, dogpile, etc…absolutely have to rank sites based on relevancy and quality (content). Think about it. If you searched Google for ‘macbook’ and it returned sites that feature 12 year-olds bragging on their blogs that they just got a ‘cool new macbook for Christmas’, you would think to yourself, “that wasn’t what I was looking for’, you’d be annoyed, you’d vow never to use Google again, so would everyone else – and, here’s the kicker, Google would go out of business. Out of business! So, no, you can’t pay the search engines for a high rank. If they took your money, they would die. And, they don’t want to die.
You can pay them for a high rank for your AD! Ahhh…maybe that’s what your friend meant. They may look like search returns, but they are advertisements, paid advertisements along the top and right side of the Google search returns page. (And by the way, Google ads work best when written and keyworded by expert SEO copywriters!) (I have some names if you need them.)