Google and text links

[ownerrim]

Just checked the backlinks for a site that has just suddenly appeared out of nowhere and gone to the number one position in the MSN serps for a certain keyword.

Yahoo backlinks check shows 680,000 links (all on the pages of an online version of a newspaper). This tells me that Msn is very easy to game.

However, since in principle there's nothing wrong with text links (in particular, a text link on a newspaper site is really just plain old advertising), I wonder if this if a safe approach as far as the google serps are concerned?

Would google see these run-of-site purchased text links
as advertising on the part of the publisher, or as an attempt to spam. My guess is that, at the worst, they simple discount the links in some way so that google can't be gamed in this way. Thoughts?

[ownerrim]

c'mon guys. somebody throw me a bone here

[ownerrim]

ok, no bones no problem. I went back to msn to see it again since I couldn't recall the url (investigated quite a few "anomalies"). Now the site that has backlinks without end is gone completely. Have no idea what that means

[ncreegan]

It's been proposed that Google looks at *too many* site wide links as spam, and some as legit. What is too many, I certainly have no clue, but I do know that I've had much better luck getting results from links placed in articles and on content specific pages than when they are placed site wide.

As for MSN, from what I've seen it's constantly dancing around, I have a site for a popular keyword that goes from 1-2-3-2-1-4-5-7-1-3-2, and the backlinks go anywhere from 50-5k on a daily basis.

edit - speeling eror

[ownerrim]

Personally, I'd like to believe that site-wide links can't hurt you, and that perhaps you simply get a declining return for each additional link