Google has its idiosyncracies (e.g. approving person A’s AdWords ad while disapproving person B’s ad which points to the same landing page). But Google is on the right trackhere. 90% of website owners will be locked out of front page listings if Google doesn’t go after paid links.

While I agree that when they mention that search engines need people to create quality content that can be indexed, what does that have to do with links? Am I missing something? Sure, it’s quality content is good. Just because it’s quality content doesn’t mean that it has to actually link out to other sites, though (paid links or not). Outoing links isn’t a prerequisite to quality content.

Thanks for clarifying the Google ads, Aaron.

First, congrats: Toprank’s BIGLIST.

Second, we’ve an interesting discussion on paid links in blog posts on my blog, trying to guess Google’s take on different sort of links. It would be awesome if you could step in to set the records straight

Thanks
Sebastian

I know a little about Google Pay Per Action, but the click looks like it’s a 302 through /pagead/ subdirectory on googlesyndication.com, which is disallowed by robots.txt. The machine-readable side of the equation is covered in the context of my post. I know that these links will by default not count for relevance and/or reputation, so I have no problem with them.

The human-readable aspect of PPA is present in the pop-up text as well, which is going further in my opinion than some of the programs aiming to sell direct text links.