Paid Links....

 ** UPDATED Nov 2014**

Further to previous comments made here, Google seems to be concentrating its efforts on protecting the integrity of it organic listings. The best way for it to do this is to prevent larger organisations from buying their way to the top via paid links.

Google even encourages webmasters to report paid links!!

The tightrope currently being walked is tricky to get right, for in effect Google is a seller of paid ads themselves. In actuality they are a publisher who displays dutch auction ads on their pages, and not much more..... but the sum of the parts quite frequently adds up to more than the individual components.

When is a paid ad a banner? Are all banner ads going to be penalised? In which event many Google adsense campaigns would surely fall foul?

I get the feeling that it is more the case of being seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something that is the important issue here.

There is no doubt that many sites that rank highly in Google for very competitive keywords have paid links pointing to them.

Is a paid directory classed as a paid link?...... only it seems if it is a low quality directory! High quality directories are ok by Google.