Google And The Paid Links Issue

The Web community is abuzz with a new debate on paid links and where and how they are placed. In his series of posts on the subject over the weekend, Google's Matt Cutts discussed how some websites are hiding paid links with CSS - a recent fad amplified by the use of sponsored WordPress themes. Cutts pointed to a site which was linking to a pornography site via this method, saying "In my opinion, this is a good example of a link that crosses over into deceptiveness and violates our quality guidelines."

But links that are not hidden? According to Cutts, this presents no problem. The lesson, keep your nose clean - Google may be looking at devaluing paid links more closely in the future and artificially gaming the system may come back to hurt you.

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Technorati Tags: google, matt cutts, paid links, css, hidden text, seo