A website can sell links like you're describing.. that's not illegal. I've seen ad networks that only sold those types of links.

What's being described in the article is commercial bribery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the BBC doesn't actually sell those links, it was probably a similar situation to the article.

Was the traffic worth that? If so, would it have been worth it if the corrupt employee had been reassigned after three months rather than three years?

He did it for SEO purposes most likely.

"Was the effect on your rankings worth it ?" would be a better question.

SEO was the idea behind it, authority websites etc.

Was a long time ago so could not give authoritative answer on traffic, the aim of post was to highlight that staff at orgs can be er, pliable it seems.

For the record I never dealt with someone at the BBC just a chap who said he could get links added - took a punt for a few grand and he came through.

Interestingly I have just googled the guy... and the company is more formal now but still offers 'natural' editorial links including the BBC as an example.

What are"dofollow links?"

when you link out to another website, that tells google that the site is probably kind of important. The more links you have, especially from important high traffic domains like bbc.com, the more likely it is that your site will rank for search terms. This is how it works by default.

Because lots of the web involves users being the content creators (comment sections and whatnot), Google created a "nofollow" tag that basically nullifies the above effect.

If you go to an article on bbc.com and post a comment with a link, I'm 99% certain without checking that it will have the nofollow link attached. It'd hurt bbc's own rankings as well as make their comments section unusable if not because it'd be spammed to hell by SEO people. So what you want is for your link to appear in the article or main body of content where they wont apply the nofollow tag usually (particularly if you pay for it), and google will think your site is hot shit.