My article of the day goes to this article that examines Google’s stance on paid links and asks if Google is being reasonable or not.

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On GoogleMore and more, I’ve been seeing people wondering if they’ve lost traffic on Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google’s generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that’s changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it.

It is well worth reading this piece of news, and considering for yourself what to do. In the face of Google’s slow PR rank update, flipflop on paid links, and general high handedness in all things search, some companies are now exploring other metrics as a way to figure out what their audience’s worth. And some bloggers, like John Chow, seem particularly unphased by the issues, despite still not ranking well, after his penalty by Google.

I’m not an SEO expert, so I’d appreciate some feedback on that one!