Don’t buy paid links! Paid links are bad! Don’t cloak either. Search engines don’t allow it. You’ve all heard this before right?

>>> What are your thoughts on paid links? Do you agree with Google’s hard line? Comment here…

In an earlier post I chastised Google for giving straight links to partners, However now I’ve found a whole bunch more…

One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.

Search optimization pros bade farewell to paid links and other techniques after Google made certain changes through the past year.

Michael Gray doesn’t know who I am, I don’t expect him to. We sat next to each other one day at lunch during Pubcon, he is a polite, engaging guy, with obviously tons of knowledge in SEO/SEM field.

Paid links and PR drops were a hot topic at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. We talked to Matt Cutts about it in a video interview, and he explained it quite rationally.

The wild debate about Google’s increasingly hardline stance against paid links looks like Wimbledon, with Matt Cutts taking on Rich Skrenta, while Danny Sullivan volleys against Michael Gray.

The dominant search engine, Google, doesn’t have a problem with nofollowed paid links, but few webmasters want to pay for something that brings minimal value to their sites.

Let the bargaining begin. It’s a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow.

Google continues to beat the drum about passing PageRank through paid links as Matt Cutts weighed in on the topic with another request that webmasters use the ‘nofollow’ attribute for them.

 Google has officially said that buying and selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of the company’s Webmaster Guidelines, and can result in a drop in search rankings.

Because Google has neglected to make certain links from its site nofollow, webmasters are wondering how, exactly, they differ from paid links. 

The recent slap a handful of directories experienced was unaccompanied by an explanation from Google, though the general consensus (maybe) was that Google’s webspam team was sending a message. Weeks later, WebProNews has wrangled a response from Google’s Webmaster Central team – sort of.

The paid link debate has a new topic to chew on, namely the official word and demonstrated effect of Google penalizing sites that sell links.

It’s been a couple of weeks since it became apparent that Google was penalizing link directories – at least a few of them – knocking them out of the SERPs even for their own business names. There’s still no official word from Google on this, but there is plenty speculation that it wasn’t algorithmic.

Google is offering users a way to report paid links in an effort to provide searchers with better results, a move that has generated plenty of discussion.

Over at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Vanessa Fox announces a “report paid links” feature, after previously asking us to use the spam report to snitch on those selling paid links.

Google added a new section to webmaster central today entitled “report paid links”. How anyone other than me or quite possibly my book keeper know whether a link is paid or not is very questionable, but let’s dig just a little deeper shall we.

You can get the full data on this page but I’ll reprint it here because some of you might be concerned about privacy issues as far as Google is conceded: