Matt Cutts, in June 17, 2008 Blog Post, Still Harping On Paid Links
The quote below is from this post on Matt Cutts’ blog. Matt Cutts is the Google policy spokesman for SEO. While we do not have an opinion about the use of paid links, we know many sites who use this tactic successfully. Most of the sites we know have been largely unaffected by penalties even when their page ranks were downgraded. This includes Forbes.com. If you do use paid links you are doing so at your own risk. Google is judge, jury and executioner. And they appear to be looking for people to turn in competitors who use paid links, read the quote below from his June 17, 2008 blog post:
By the way, we’re currently caught up on paid link reports, so if you know of sites (maybe in your search niche) that appear to be selling or buying paid links that pass PageRank, it’s a great time to let us know. Use the authenticated paid link spam report form and someone will investigate the report. We’ll be concentrating primarily on the sellers, but if you send us a site that



