I’m not against those sites. Like I said, this is not even the full list. If someone really digs deep in the Y!Site Explorer, he will find a tons more.

I just don’t want Dell to get away with paid links (simply because of their reputation) where small webmasters gets penalized for buying links…

Those are called affiliate links. Some, if not all of them has “No-follow” tag. They also don’t have any anchor text in them. They are placed for advertising purpose.

Next time you write a comment, use your real name and web address. You don’t need to stay anonymous to support paid links. I have a lot of friends who supports paid links and they aren’t afraid to show it off.

And don’t worry – I don’t think Matt Cutts reads my blog

So what about those sponsor links on the top right of this site, do you give them out of the kindness of your heart? Because if you generate any money in any way from them, then they are paid links with a banner.

And about pointing to the sites that sell links — well it depends on whats your view about “paid links”.

I personally don’t support paid links and i consider it ‘pure black hat’. There are many ways one can acquire links that are ‘white-hat’.

Dell could hold a contest and ask the bloggers to write about “dell servers” — They could give away their latest server to the winner. This would have naturally got them a lot of links — none of which they would have to pay for. Also the volume of the links would have been substantial and it would have given them more benefit than just the Ranking advantage.

If they could manage 5000 bloggers to write about them, it means atleast 5000 links — Traffic from the followers of those 5000 blogs + securing 5000 pages in the search index that talks about “Dell Servers”.

And yes, they should probably fire their SEO expert if he/she is building these kinds of links, and with generic anchor text. lol.