They can say what ever they want but, I myself have benfitted PR by buying links in the past and have several subscriptions going on. I do count my personal experience.
Maldives that's great and I hope it stays that way. But it can happen to any site. Look at this post. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ My comments are way down in the bottom. Its a shame what they did to searchking. Wiped them out. They have like 20k links and a pr0. If I get crazy enough, I'm gonna start crawling all the sites on the web and start my own link ranking system. LOL. I guess that would be nice.
It's obvious 'natural' links are better. But payed links are going to be around as long as humans want to make money online. Whether for traffic or for pagerank - either way links matter (even if they have 'rel no follow').
Directories are greatly discredited however paid ones have more value because generally the links are related and there are less of them. but even those are greatly discredited because it is so varied. The PR means nothing to me but you can keep them from knowing and hence you will get the PR and rankings. There is a post on Aaron walls blog about this. Do a search and you probably can find it. It explains it better. I buy links from time to time and use it for traffic and always set it up so Google doesn't know and I get the value as well. Having 'sponsored', 'paid' and related terms near links will make them greatly dis valued. I hope you don't mind me quoting the rep you gave me. BTW it was green which was nice. Matt knows my feelings on this and there is really nothing he can do even if he wanted to. He could go through all my backlinks and he wouldn't be able to find out which were paid. BTW I do not use paid links to achieve rankings. It is easier for me to use natural seo with linkbait techniques. I do keep the value because I think for what I pay I should get SE value as well as the traffic the link sends.
Buying text links is one of the only ways to get your page ranked at the top of the search engines. (otherwise the older sites, with more natural backlinks will always come out ahead) Google (and all the other search engines) have secret codes they use to rank a page, they change it all the time, and it is flawed. Just look at the results and you can tell. Adwords advertisers can skew the results by simply paying more. Search will never be perfect. I suggest in the future, you will be able to "vote" on a good site, and that will effect the search results. (but then, there will probobly be an incentive to vote, ha ha) -RonMo
Your a webmaster I presume so you are biased. But that isn't what the searching world is saying. Those millions who use google daily love it and so I think they accomplished something. And your dead wrong. I use natural methods over paid because it is more effective and easier for me. And I can beat any old site and old day of any old week. Just name the site, keyword and price. Most old sites are held by age to a great degree which means a few good links will get you over them.
There are plenty of other ways to get links. Link bait, news editorials, etc. More links isn't always better. A few links from high quality sites with a lot of trust will outrank an old site with thousands of backlinks any day.
I've heard that one before, do u know where it says it. I got this from googles webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Perhaps this is off topic, but to address this comment in particular, I don't think that the general web surfing public even knows what pagerank is. Nor do I think that the general public uses it to judge a site before deciding whether or not to make a purchase from that site. I will go so far as to say that it is my belief that most people do not even have the google toolbar installed on their computer to be able to see the pagerank of a website. Of course these are just my assumptions.
Call it experience. I have been doing this long enough and have done it with many sites. I know what works, semi-works and what doesn't work. I am sure many other seo say it somewhere. And your probably right a certain degree. the Googel toolbar is used by the public but to a great big degree by webmasters.