Is it possible to purchase an organic position? Common sense would tell me no. Surely AdWords is the only way to purchase a place on the Google results pages. Yet, an SEO company has guaranteed me a place in the organic listings for my keywords because it has a special reseller deal with Google. How can this be? Is this a scam?

Yep, scam. Walk away. Quickly.

Scam, scam, scam. The "special reseller deal with Google" is the big tip-off. There is no such thing. Run away!!

I would love to see the details of that offer.

"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Webmaster Tools and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever."

- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

;)

I have been offered something similar, however it was NOT a scam. This is how the deal worked:

A legit company worked very hard to get top ranking (page 1) for a high traffic and desirable term. Then they approached me and said in essence, "How would you like your company to be the hero element of this particluar page with great rankings?".

If you bought into it, they would add a bunch of content and link the traffic from the page out to you. The page seemed to maintain its rankings despite several different "advertisers" cycling through it over the course of a year or two.

Disclaimer - They never GUARANTEED a specific ranking. They only offered to put you on a page with a visible top ranking at time of purchase.

No offense, but you sound like you're trying to sell it. Sounds like you just might work for a company that offers this. How would you know if "your spot" maintained its position throughout many other companies coming in on the page??

It's very bad business in my opinion. Here's why:
You never own that spot.
If they want to raise your rate, you pay more, otherwise your competition gets the spot.
You need to calculate the conversion rate of that page (conversion being a click through to your page) then calculate the conversion rate of your linked to page, then figure out how much it would be of value. Typically you'll see huge drop offs in traffic amounts coming from the search result page to your landing page, then again to what ever conversion you're tracking.

It's not a very good long term strategy.

However "elwalkers" situations sounds a lot different then the "buy links on our page that ranks" strategy you're mentioning.

They only offered to put you on a page with a visible top ranking at time of purchase.

That is entirely different than folks offering a guarantee and claiming to have a "special" deal with Google.