It’s official. Google doesn’t want paid links that are followed. More at Techmeme.com.

I pondered last week if this was a TextLinkAds.com killer? I don’t think it will be because the guys at TLA are pretty smart and should figure out a way to rebound from this brand assassination they are getting right now.

What do you think?

Update: Joel in the comments points to this information about TLA today.

.. we have just uploaded changes to our marketplace that should significantly increase the privacy of your ad buys. We will no longer be revealing pictures or URLs to our users. We feel moving to a more private marketplace will prove more valuable to you the advertiser in the long term. This way your competitors, or other market players, will not have any access to which sites are selling text link ads. In addition to more privacy for your ad buys, we have advanced filtering that will allow you to find the ideal ad fast!

Does “closing” the open marketplace work?

Update #2: Shoemoney points out how easy it is to see who’s running TextLinkAds on their sites. Just do a Google search.

Are you buying or selling Google juice? The debate rages on. Or, actually, did Google just end it?

Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well.

Game on. As Sam says, if you’re going to dance, you gotta pay the band.

Or is this just Google flexing? As Andy states…

Google are attacking my personal brand, my business, and my integrity.

You know what I think? I think that Google is gonna get what they want, regardless of what some bloggers or seo’rs say or do or think.

My advice? Same as it always has been when it come to seo. If it feels wrong, Google probably thinks it is.