buckworks - 7:38 pm on Mar 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

My guess would be that it's not the "paidness" of the links that might cause certain links to be given less weight, it's what sort of structure your web presence develops and whether it shows evidence of endorsement from lots of independent sources. A site that depends heavily on paid links likely has a recognizably different footprint than a site that gains its links organically.

Example: I recently came across a site that showed several thousand backlinks in Google, and over 400,000 in Yahoo. For a moment I was impressed, but investigation showed that the site had 10,000 run-of-site links from one domain, 25,000 from another, 15,000 from somewhere else, and so on. If I factored those out, the site's remaining link popularity was comparable to other sites in the same search results.

Would search engine algos make some sort of similar adjustment before handing out brownie points for link popularity? To me it would make sense that they do ... not specifically to screen out links that were paid for but simply to give less weight to links that seem to be under common editorial control.