Many of you may have heard all of the buzz in the SEO forums about "paid links" becoming obsolete and detectable by Google.  Well if you want to jump on the bandwagon and quit using them, you'll be left in the dust.  Lets just say about 10% of search engine marketers/optimizers are now choosing to avoid purchasing links or even know of the buzz surrounding them at the moment. Well what do you think the other 90% are doing? I'll tell you: THEY ARE STILL BUYING LINKS.

Go ahead and stop using them for your practices and watch your competitors take your rankings from you right before your eyes. Google has already made it clear, that if you list your outgoing "paid links" under a title/section/page named "Our Sponsors" or "Our Advertisers" these links will not penalized because the purpose of them is being displayed and not hidden. This tells Google these links are for traffic not manipulating the SERP's (even though that could still be the reason you are after).

Second reason why paid links will not die, but at worst will simply adapt. 

Including links directly in content will be undetectable. When Google comes up with it algorithm for weeding out paid links and penalizing sites for them they will have you use words like "links", "sponsors", "advertisers" etc. (I'm not contradicting myslef here by using the terms sponsors and advertisers, these terms will be used in the algo to find paid links, not necessarily penalize them). If your links are directly in your content, the algo cannot possibly determine whether or not you were paid to place those links. Unless plans to create a call center with a staff of 1 million, they will never be able to contact every site owner and interogate them as to whether or not anyone is paying them for a link on their site.

So today's lesson is, keep using paid links, just be more specifc and aware about the placement of them. Include them directly in the content (which also has benefit to you in terms of creating "relevant back links" assuming the content in which the link is placed is your niche) or under a section labled "Advertisers" or "Sponsors".

I'll post more about this ongoing issue in the nbear future. Hope I could help!

The SEO Samurai