Scoreboard - 5:36 pm on Mar 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's not terribly difficult for Google (or any other engine) to put a dent in the value of paid link traffic. Just look at where most paid links are displayed...below the fold, segregated from the rich content, etc.

Something like a simple block level analysis could weight links in such a way that your average paid text link, by nature of it's usual page location, becomes trivial in value.

If we need paid text links for our clients these days, we negotiate for above the fold placement and in accordance with a few other factors which aren't so easily deweighted by search engines' analyses.