It's Official - Paid Links Can Harm You

After the recent drop in the rankings of certain directories, it seemed that Google was on a mission to cut out the practice of webmasters paying for premium listings on websites. A recent update to the Google Webmaster section now shows this to be true:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Google's arguement is that paid links can create inequity in searches with the people with the deepest pockets being able to buy prestige which does not correspond to their standing or merit within the community.

Buying and selling links does have a place, especially in directories that need to invest time & effort analysing their content but links sold purely for advertising purposes have no place in Google's new world and sites found exercising this practice will be penalised.