whitenight - 5:29 am on Jul 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think Tedster's referring to these issues - [webmasterworld.com...]

Now I'm confused to what you're referring to...

I'm all over that thread. (and just about every "bought" link thread similar to it for the past year)

All "reports" of sites that were "actually penalized" for selling links are purely anecdotal
ie.
"I know of a site..."
"My friend's site..."
etc.

Yet in all my research NO ONE actually received such a penalty.
Like most of the psuedo-SEO, bone-throwing that occurs on such boards,
people jumped to the most outlandish reasons (encouraged by Goog FUD) for their loss of rankings, instead of the nuts and bolts of basic SEO reasons.

In fact, even the "respected" (but uninformed) SEO gurus stopped making the claim of bought-link penalties after a while, as I'm sure they started to realize it was caused by other reasons.

(For the purposes of this discussion, a TBPR "penalty" was NEVER really a penalty but i've beat that argument to death in the aforementioned thread.)