Alex @ Net

photomatt says about paid links become penalized by Google. It becomes interesting, because from my point of view the original story contains a lot of links that I consider paid.

It looks like if I'm selling an advertising space on my site and place a few links to my sponsors, it will drop my site from Google's search result because I'm using "paid" links. It is nonsense. For me it looks like Google penalized sites for using other ad systems instead of AdSense.

I think that paid links may affect a site PR and it may be one of the 250 or even more parameters Google use to calculate it. But it never can be a "major" parameter.