Paid Links

Recently there has been much said about the evils of paid links. It is obvious the in an ideal world Google would only want to see links that had been created by someone who was doing nothing more than recommending site x to his own visitors.

That is all well and good, but this isn't an ideal world. There have been many sites penalised for buying links and yet one of the biggest seo companies in the UK pays for links on a forum that contains comments from Matt Cutts himself.

Currently the whole situation is not clear and innocent sites are being penalised unjustly. When is a paid link a paid link precisely? Banner ads are routinely bought, so are they paid links?

At the minute the jury is out, just don't say that you haven't been warned.