Many webmasters who have been following the discussions about Google’s dislike of paid links have been confused about what constitutes bad links and good links, in the eyes of the search engine companies. In this article, I will seek to answer many of the questions people have on this topic.
There are two kinds of links that you can pay to have made for you: rented or paid links, and permanent links.
Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented Links
With Rented links, you can generally make your purchase decision based on the PageRank of a page.
The downside with rented links is that Google has stated that they do not like links that are sold on the basis of PageRank, and they are trying to create systems to identify links rented for PageRank, for the purpose of discounting those links. While they may eventually be able to target and negate links developed by systems like Text-Link-Ads or TextLinkBrokers, they will never be able to completely identify and discount all links that are sold for the purposes of PageRank .
In the end, I suppose Google is not going to penalize the Source or Target websites...