Is there any truth to that?

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

I dont believe it.

For one, Unless google have some kind of crystal ball how the hell would they know what i am buying or selling? Secondly, It's not exactly fair that we should limit the ways in which we advertise just because google happened to invent something as flawed and stupid as page rank.

If they want to have thier page rank, and i want to sell advertisment space it's google who have to sort any problems that come up as a result of that.
They can't just say "if you sell text link it screws up our page rank,, so please don't sell text links".

Or are we supposed to believe that google can not only tell which links have been sold, But are also able to tell what your intentions were for buying those links..
Were they to increase page rank, or were they to increase visitors as a result of people clicking that link..

I'm sure if google could detect accurately sold links, the recipient's rankings would suffer, but as stOx said they don't have a crystal ball. If you don't use text giving it away like "sponsored links", you can't distinguish between a sold link and a free link.

I highly doubt Google could catch you doing it. Just make sure your site doesn't turn into a link farm.

google gets their knickers in a twist about websites set up purely for manipulating SERPS. If thats not what you are doing then dont sweat it, all should be OK.

It's pretty safe to assume G looks at the outgoing links and determines relevance to the page content for not only giving link value to the site your linking to, but also to rank your page. If you've got a page about red apples and you link to another site about red apples - that may help both of you. On the otherhand, if you link to a page about oranges, it may not help the site your linking to hardly at all and it may even hurt your page's rankings for red apples.

So, Google tries to make selling nonrelevant links worthless by the way they program their algorithm? Do they ever manually penalize a website that is selling relevant links? Anyone know of a case where Google actually manually penalized a website for selling links?

the only time I have seen a site penalised is in a update a little while back quite a few links directories went from around pr 6-7 to around pr 0-1. I am not sure if this had some manual input but at the time i was optimising a site and I put its reciprocal links directory on a subdomain which at the time was fooling the search engines into thinking that all my incoming links were one way - at the time of this update that site took a major hit in the SERPS and all but dissapeared on its most competitive keywords.

If you are planning to make one massive directory just of links without relevant and unique information on the site then you will be extremely lucky to get any good rankings. If your site has a lot of good information and is not solely a massive collection of links then you should be able to eventually gain listings.

Originally Posted by derekwong28

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

I have the feeling that Matt Cutts usually talks about how he'd like Google to work, more than how it actually works. Google can't detect if you're selling links or not. I think the furthest Google can get is detecting some patterns in the inbound-outbound links structure, in terms of reciprocal links, etc...

Actually, why should it be forbidden? If you have a relevant and good quality site and someone estimates that you can drive qualified to their sites, why can't pay to you to post a link? Google guidelines say that you shouldn't get links to raise artificially your popularity, that's all. But selling/Buying links from relevant sites is perfectly fair in my opinion.

seo madrid.. i fully agree with you.

you can buy links for natural traffic too, not for the PR. And they can't penalize that. but if you buy it for the pr, i can understand they don't like it..

but THAT difference is untracable (is that a word? )