Great find by Wiep.net.

"Although Google stated that Googlebombing would become very difficult in the future, SERPs show still examples of pretty good results. This not only shows that link bombing still works (I never thought it didn’t work anymore, btw), but it also proves that anchor text is really important (like we didn’t know that) and it also is an indication that footer links aren’t as worthless as some say they are (nice to see some proof again)."

And an excellent comment made by Michael Martine on this blog last week:

"If Google is so great at detecting paid links and not allowing them to pass PR, then why should anyone bother with nofollow?"

Google’s words don’t appear to match their actions….

I’ll write more on this topic in due course, however Barry has an excellent write-up of the "Are Paid Links Evil" session at SES.

"Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is - Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes"

In response, Michael Gray:

"Google developed an algorithm based on links. That is flawed. They expect you to change your business model and implementations to compensate for flaws in their algorithm. Last quarter, Google made 1.12 billion dollars. They want you to sacrifice your profits to keep them profitable. They want you to do that for free….Why Google is opposed to paid links: they work. It’s nearly impossible to rank in any competitive SERP without paid links, except if you’re Wikipedia. Google runs a competitive advertising product and they want to keep it profitable."

The crowd went wild, apparently.

Bruce Clay also has coverage.

Great video, too. Just like being there.