Google already punished companies who use robot backlinks. Is Google taking more measurement on paid links this year? Are they going to punish all paid links or some of them? How to avoid potential punishment? Many thanks.
They've been working on the algorithm to sniff out paid links. The trick is just to avoid spammy and bad-neighborhood sites, and then not buy sitewide links or sidebar links that are clearly paid. Keep your incoming links relevant and you should be ok. Quality, not quantity, does wonders!
I think so. After the past PR update, it seems that sites that sell links (even for advertising) are getting some kind of penalty. I say this because I think one of my sites has received some kind of penalty. Paid links should be tagged with nofollow. So its not really "paid links", its links that are bought and sold that do not use the nofollow tag. Matt Cutts (who is a big wig at google) posted on his blog how google finds paid links. Look up Matts blog and read through it. There are some interesting comments that google takes paid links very seriously.
The trend seems to be shifting to only penalizing the link sellers. Then they devalue the link sellers outgoing links so that the link buyer stops getting the benefits from that link. Google still seems worried about penalizing too many link buyers. They realize that a lot of these people are the same ones paying for adwords ppc. Google may also be worried that if they get too aggressive then they might open the door to competitors sabotaging each other by buying links for each other.
Paid Links are always hated by Google.... Many Thanks SEO Company Singapore http://www.themedseoservices.com