Matt Cutts has now posted on his blog about not buying links for SEO purposes and stick to advertising for traffic and other purposes. He strongly suggests that webmasters are misusing paid links to manipulate search engine rankings.

This had been spoken about since 2004 but his recent post on reporting paid links and telling people how exactly to go about reporting that (using the keyword - “paidlink” in their abuse messages to Google. No matter what, even thinking about this from a neutral point of view, it seems the search engine giants are trying to bully people into get their way which would ofcourse be for more and more people looking towards PPC (adwords) for advertising and Contextual ads (adsense) for helping publishers earn an income. Its a huge divide as the CPC generally is going down, so a webmaster would earn much more by selling links rather than relying on PPC income.

One issue where my views do concur with him, is on the topic of hidden links. We are seeing more and more .edu and .gov sites being abused with such links without the consent of the site owners and this needs to be stopped soon!