I have an established ecommerce retail site that has good content depth, traffic and repeat customers. The site is going on 6 years old and early on I bought a few quality (but obviously paid) links. When Google officially banned this in 2007 I stopped buying them immediately, but didn't cancel all of my existing placements. Has anyone had any experience with this coming back to bite?
As far as I know Google won't ban you for paid links before the date of it's being banned. Still, don't go spreading it around. Better to be careful than lose your site. In fact, if your site is legit and you don't rely on those bought links too much, just have them take the links down. It's better to lose a small amount of page rank that you can make up for somewhere else than to lose your whole site over it. That's just my thoughts though.