Matt Cutts has said that Google considers buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines and wants to eradicate all unnatural linking.

Sites that publicly sell links have been penalised by Google on Search engine results pages and on PageRank passing ability.

Nearly all major search engines use links as editorial votes given by choice to the website. If sites buy links to increase their standing on search engine results pages, websites that naturally attract links to rank are at a disadvantage.

It seems evident that Google is getting better at detecting paid links and penalising sites that publicly sell them.

This is great news for Webmasters and users alike because once paid links are removed from the equation, Google can assign trust based on links gained over the past year with much more confidence than before. This results in higher quality with more relevant search results.

Now those with smaller budgets have a better chance of attaining the top results on organic listings, and those with bigger budgets actually have to work on attracting naturally links and can`t just buy their way to the top.

For those Webmasters that need or want to use paid links without being penalised, they can use the nofollow tag, which is a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn`t have to be counted as a vote.

Do all search engines see paid links as a bad thing? Apparently so, although Yahoo`s Jeremy Zawodny uses paid links on his personal blog…

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