Truth be told, Google has descended on paid links. Ask forbes.com, washingtonpost.com and a lot of high profile sites; they have experienced the wrath of the new trend. They just had their page rank slashed by 2-4 points. This is why some established sites are entertaining doubts about "paid links."

One of the reasons for the paid link shakedown is the growing notion that paid links are not true and not qualified as "voting" links. But the fact is the search engine giant is not in opposition to paid links per se.

Google said last summer that all paid links should be identified as such or risk a penalty. Particularly, it has been suggested that paid links should use the nofollow attribute, which tells Google the link is not intended to transfer PageRank. Use of the nofollow attribute clearly identifies the link as "non-voting." But a lot of sites ignored the warning. Then, in the fourth week of October, Google dropped the dreaded axe.

Rumors in the web search engine optimization industry are that the buyers of these paid links could be the next to be hit. So beware.

How do you circumvent this? If you are a seller of links, use the nofollow attribute. If you are a buyer of links, don't do it for SEO, or you will be very much saddened!